I'm old enough to remember quite a few predictions of when petroleum would be so scarce that it would be economically useless, each of which has been proven wrong in turn. There is the distinct possibility of technological change in renewable energy production and distribution coupled with technology change in petroleum synthesis resulting in oil always being available enough for the purposes for which it is unsubstitutable.
I've seen writing from about 100 years ago worried that the world would run out of coal, the dominant fuel of the day, thereby causing the railroads and factories of the industrial revolution to cease.
Whew. It's good to know that if we were wrong in the past on some topic we'll always be wrong.
Oil is not renewable. The crux of the argument for peak oil, as I understand it, is not that we'll run out of oil but that extracting it will become quickly very expensive. And building alternatives, as we already know, is very expensive. So that we'll have a period of time where we'll have a dramatic decline in our standard of living.
It doesn't matter if we'll always have oil if very few people will use it.
