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Abstract Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (CEOR) represents a fifty-year paradox: decades of laboratory and simulation advances have not translated into sustained commercial deployment. We demonstrate that this chronic underperformance stems from a fundamental category error: applying deterministic, equilibrium-based design tools to a process that is, in fact, a complex adaptive system. Through forensic analysis of historical project data and Bayesian assessment of International Energy Agency (IEA) project counts (1971-2017), we establish the systemic decline of CEOR, revealing a collapse in active projects from over 110 in the late 1980s to 35 in 2017, with only 15% of projects achieving lifetime commercial success. This analysis exposes a fundamentally bimodal performance structure, with sustained commercial-scale operations concentrated in China and a handful of exceptional fields elsewhere. The broader global pattern, however, is characterized by pilot-scale attempts, intermittent trials, and a high rate of market abandonment, underscoring the technology's systemic challenges outside of uniquely favorable conditions (IEA, 2017; AlSofi et al., 2012). The root cause is identified as constitutive drift, where governing parameters (e.g., wettability, adsorption, interfacial tension) co-evolve with injection, causing fixed-parameter models to diverge from field reality. We reframe CEOR as a reactive system requiring a new design philosophy, formalizing the Daqing methodology as ‘Adaptive Determinism’ a closed-loop learning system that continuously updates constitutive behavior through preserved-state cores and recursive surveillance (Lu et al., 2023; Seright, 2016). The paper concludes by prescribing the Adaptive CEOR Management System, a seven-pillar operational framework integrating force-balance screening, hybrid physics-informed machine learning, and probabilistic sanctioning. By acknowledging CEOR's inherent complexity and replacing deterministic prediction with adaptive control, the industry can bridge the conceptual gap that has constrained its potential for half a century.