$1 per barrel to extract? That's it, folks! Peak Oil has been officially CANCELLED

False Dichotomy Fallacy

There's a world of choices between "we're doomed" and "we're saved", and they're pretty much all more valid than either.

***

The world has an enormous amount of heavy oil. Producing heavy oil requires an enormous amount of infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn't magically appear overnight, even if you have the money to pay for it.

It's not easy to get high flow rates from heavy oil.

It's entirely possible that the world will be producing increasing amounts of heavy oil for decades to come, and that doing so will have virtually no effect on the timing of peak oil. That doesn't make it a savior and it doesn't make it useless; it just makes it another factor to consider.