Then, in 1986, the oil price collapsed. PDO was required to cut costs while increasing production and maintaining reserves. The Company turned its focus on innovation and experimentation. Technological leaps in processing the huge volumes of data acquired in three-dimensional seismic surveys helped PDO to explore with great success during this period. Horizontal wells, which made their debut in 1986, yielded between two and four times the production from any one given well. (They have since become the norm in PDO.)