I remember ten years ago when worrying about Peak Oil was all the rage. You don't hear too much about that nowadays…
It was just as obvious a hundred years ago that horse manure piling up in city streets was just going to keep getting worse.
we can all agree that it's a non-renewable resource which will not be around forever
True but irrelevant. The oil supply is finite only in physical terms, not in economic terms. It is possible to extract an unbounded amount of value from a bounded resource. All you need is an increasing price, which happens automatically as supplies decrease, and which provides an incentive for substitution. I'd happily take a wager that humanity will transition off petroleum long before we "run out" of oil.
The stuff really is more challenging to produce, you need much more understanding and higher quality tools. Fortunately we're enjoying the compound interest of computers, software, material science and a million other fields that make difficult things simpler.
I won't take your transition bet, but i would bet if we had to extract oil using only technology older than 2000, we'd be pretty screwed.
Conventional "stick a tube in the ground" oil may well have peaked or may peak soon, but there's more oil around than that.
It's also not entirely clear that peak oil would mean "oil prices will always go up." If anything, it could lead to successive rounds of demand destruction. I think the most likely scenario would be a "sawtooth wave" price on the way down the peak as rising costs lead to substitution (gas, EVs) and demand destruction (recessions, people moving closer to where they work) which in turn causes price declines. The ultimate demand destruction would be large-scale investment in public transit, which has to some extent been spurred by crazy gas prices.
Eventually we'll get there, but not this century...and possibly never if non-petroleum energy sources are developed between now and the end of the century.
Remember, petroleum was the answer to the "Peak Oil" problem of the 1840's & 50's.
We were running out of whale oil...and the solution wasn't more efficient ways to hunt and kill whales (though that did extend the life of the industry by a couple of decades). The solution was an entirely new energy source.
Petroleum will undergo the same transition...and the new recovery technology has bought the world a few additional decades to find that solution...
Lexcorvus and I apparently have similar memories, because my recollection is that all the articles discussing peak oil had a mandatory section predicting the eminent demise of Western Civilization (and quite a large percentage were giddy at the notion).