Hello Paul,
You are absolutely right. Our enemies ia conservatism and bureaucracy.
I have a long time experience with it.
Below my opinion about situation.

…The impending oil crisis…. Peak oil…?
Everything isn't so bad.

Indeed, depletion discovered global resources, including oil and natural gas, push world economic to depression.
However most forecasts and estimations the situation proceed from conventional level of exploration technology and discovered volume of reserves. I believe it is wrong.

Firstly, undiscovered world hydrocarbon reserves are too far from ending. For example, the world’s second largest discovery in the past 20 years occurred at Brazil's Tupi field, in November, 2007. Estimated recoverable reserves could reach eight billion barrels. Some early was discovered Sugar Loaf field (25-40 billion barrels).
Swiss-based Manas Petroleum stated that a resource evaluation in north-western Albania had assigned 2.987 billion barrels of oil with 3.014 trillion cubic feet of associated gas.
Oil contents of the US Outer Continental Shelf estimates as about 19 billion barrels and so on.
There are many large undiscovered oil fields (perhaps about 40-50%).

Secondly, the leaders of the oil industry see the only way out of the current situation in the increase of the extent of drilling (the number of exploration wells). However, if one takes into account that at the current exploration success rate only one quarter of the drilled wells is successful, the active drill-ships drill and will drill mostly (three out of four) dry wells, which will be permanently plugged and abandoned after the drilling. Drilling costs for some of the newest deep-water ships in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, have reached about $600,000 a day ($150,000 a day in 2002) and such drilling is carried out mostly (75%) for nothing due to conventional methods of drill site predictions.
“With exploration wells in the Gulf of Mexico costing up to $100 m and a deepwater exploration success rate of 11 percent in 2006, minimization of exploration risk is critical”, writes Philip Christie, Vice President of the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE), New Generation Oil&Gas, issue 3, 2007.
Now a success rate increased insignificantly, compared with 2006.

Dry wells are a fee society has to pay for conservatism of the oil industry leaders and government energy agencies because exists an exploration technology already for more than 20 years with success rate 75%, in other words three success wells and one dry. It has been successfully tested in the Barents and Black seas, as well as in the Gulf of Mexico. It employs a new physical mechanism to initiate a response from hydrocarbon deposits, explained in US patents №№ 7,330,790, February 2008; 7,042,601, May 2006 and 7,245,560 July 2007. It is called Binary Seismo-Electromagnetic (BSE) technology/method, and is, according to the definition of Wikipedia.com, a disruptive technology.
Implementation of the technology will be important step to world energy security and economic prosperity.

Thank you for attention.
www.binaryseismoem.weebly.com