I think it's quite a bit more than that.

If you look at conventional oil, we know how much we have found, and we can predict fairly well, how much more we shall find. We can even estimate, at what price this oil can be economically produced. If you look at Birol's graph, you see that with all of the conventional oil that we have already found, the oil still peaks within the next few years, and thereafter, we'll have a problem on the supply side. BP is simply not telling us the truth.

Of course, if you add the unconventional oil, we still have lots of oil available, at least theoretically. In fact, the theoretical supply of oil is infinite, because we can regrow the commodity in the form of biofuels.

However, some of this oil will never be producible, not because it is too expensive, but because its EROEI is too low. If the EROEI is at 1 or even below, it makes no sense to produce this oil irrespective of its cost. Furthermore, there is the problem of time constants. We can regrow oil from plants, but not at an infinite speed, only at the speed with which the plants will grow. Consequently, we have a bandwidth problem.

I agree with you, and many people here at TOD have already said so, that there is also a demand side problem. Demand destruction does set in when the oil becomes too expensive. Demand destruction may in fact obscure and soften the impact of the supply side problem.

We have said many times: if there were only 1 billion people living on this globe, peak oil wouldn't be a problem. Similarly, if the demand for the commodity continues to diminish more rapidly than the supply, we won't ever notice the shrinking supply at all.

Yet, I don't think that this is going to happen. Until now we are still at the flat top of oil supply. As time proceeds, the shrinking of the supply will accelerate, and I am pretty sure it will overtake the diminishing demand.