When laypeople who don't know the first thing about the hydrocarbons industry start talking about "peak oil", they come off sounding as stupid as when former senator Ted Stevens described the internet as a "series of tubes" that can get clogged up.
The world has sufficient hydrocarbons to last hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And there is no limit to human ingenuity in inventing new technology to economically produce those resources. Any nation, company, or individual that bets on 'peak oil' is doing so on an ideological basis and is going to loose big. Having people who have never set foot on a drill rig babbling on about 'peak oil' is tantamount to someone who doesn't understand computing betting against Moore's Law.
For example: The combination of swell packers for multi-stage fracture stimulation of multi-lateral wells in tight oil and shale gas resource plays, coupled with multi-azimuth 3D seismic for detecting naturally occurring fracture networks,and microseismic for frac job design has completely revolutionized the US hydrocarbons business in the past few years. These are new technologies applied to produce oil and gas resources that used to be considered uneconomic.
Every now and then you hear some talking head warning about how Moore's Law is about to stop scaling. Meanwhile, Intel keeps adding new process technologies to their roadmap. Does the semiconductor industry have the technology in 2009 to build some of these fab's? No. Will the industry invent the technology to build that fab? Yes. It's the same thing with hydrocarbons.
BTW, a lot of the advances in semiconductor process technology are being used to discover new reserves of hydrocarbons. For example, one of the leading applications of NVIDIA's gp-gpu technology is for 3D-Seismic oil and gas exploration.