In the comments, JonFreise referenced a potentially pertinent article to the Dispersive Discovery Model:
http://dieoff.org/page197.htm
Net Energy Analysis of the U.S. Oil and Gas Exploration Industry
"Why should yield per effort be related to effort? This makes sense for fish, for the fish can recover through reproduction and growth when not fished. Petroleum obviously cannot, at least on time scales of interest to our species. One possible explanation is that when drilling rates are low, the petroleum industry drills at locations where present information suggests that success is most likely. During years of high drilling rates, drilling is done there plus at other, less promising locations. Presumably the development of exploration theory, as well as seismic charting and interpretation, occurs at a more constant rate than drilling effort, so that when drilling effort (i.e., economic incentive) is low, it is concentrated in areas where success appears more likely. When drilling effort (and economic incentive) is high, much of that effort is directed at targets less likely to produce a large find. In a sense it is promising but untested geologic information that is depleted as wells are drilled and that accumulates in the absence of drilling."
I don't disagree with this as it basically says that a wide range of search rates get deployed over the years, and much of the high/fast effort gets expended near the margins of potential oil volume. The Dispersive Discovery model essentially takes a probabilistic range in search rates over a large potential volume of finds to come up with the more-or-less "bell-shaped" discovery curve.