This Peter McCabe has pretty impressive credentials. http://www.csiro.au/people/Peter.McCabe.html
Reportedly, he was just elected president of the American Geological Institute. He is a real geologist, unlike, say Bjorn Lombard, and he is pretty quantitative about his claims, and one imagines, has the data to back them up.

I enjoy the exchanges on the Oil Drum, and I learn a lot -- especially when the claims of supposed experts are examined by other experts. On the other hand, my field is not geology or oil -- and by analogy with dueling experts in my own field, I recognize that ego or greed sometimes trumps truth-- so I am not surprised when seemingly impossible claims are made.

Will someone who knows about this please enlighten the ignorant TOD readers such as myself?

Perhaps he is just confusing peak oil with running out of oil? Seems a rather basic mistake for someone of his background to make, but his 65 year estimate is the point where it is all gone at the present rate of consumption, and has nothing to say about the peak. In fact the point where half is gone, and so a peak is expected, is only 15 years away, and that is with his optimistic estimate of 2 trillion barrels still remaining.

Also note the misleading nature of the 65 year estimate, since it is "at the current level of world production". Simply maintaining current levels of production is not going to cut it.

Dr McCabe was a member of the US Geological Survey Assessment of global oil supplies, and says the figures show oil will last for many decades to come.

This was the survey that applied the US reserve growth phenomena (of proven reserves) to world wide IHS database reserve data. The methodology has been discredited by multiple sources. You can read about it in detail in the Energy Watch Groups Oil Report

The second point of critique refers to the fact that – as is known to all experts - the growth of
reserves in the USA in the past was much higher than elsewhere. This is a direct consequence of the regulations by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), which for financial reasons call for very conservative evaluations at the beginning of the development of an oil field. This US practice leads to systematic underestimations.

For these reasons this marked reserve growth in the past was only observed in the USA and can not be extrapolated into the next 30 years, nor even less can this pattern be applied to the whole world.

His membership/participation in that greatly distorted report really hurts his credibility. Oh, and his citing aboveground politics as the sole reason for oil price rise totally ignores the current reality of the production plateau. He might just as well have cited the abiotic hypothesis of oil origin.