I doubt, if he said those things recently, that he's seen the light of peak oil.

I also find it interesting that there have been several "official" comments from the US gov't and other high profile sources saying that oil prices will remain more or less where they are until the end of 2006.  To me, this sounds like an attempt to shape public perception as we're on the final approach to the actual peak.  

Michael Economides supported the idea that oil is extremely abundant, and "technological advances will enable us to keep producing oil at current and even greater rates." He pointed out that with inflation, the oil we have now at $25 a barrel is the cheapest in history. Oil in the 1880s was $1000 a barrel in today's money, and the current price is half the price of oil earlier in the twentieth century in constant dollars. He emphasized a well-known fact: that predictions about oil shortages in the past have universally been wrong.  Instead, Economides predicts that the world will not run out of oil for two centuries. He claims that there are tremendous undiscovered reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, the north slope of Alaska, and deeper waters offshore, not to mention many other places in the world, such as the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. But Economides believes that even these undiscovered reserves will not play the major world in meeting our need for oil, for "natural gas will become the fuel of choice throughout the world within the next decade," and this will in turn lessen our dependence on crude oil. Economides calls the trend of moving from wood to coal to oil to methane and ultimately to hydrogen the "decarbonization of fuel." Hubbert's peak is a fact, but "it will not come into fruition," because the transition to natural gas in inevitable due to the implacable, universal trend of decarbonization. Hydrogen fuel cells are "around the corner" as an energy source, and the hydrogen will come from natural gas. Petroleum (oil plus methane) will increase from 61% to 67% as a fraction of our global energy use, and the addition will be natural gas. The planet's methane resources are enormous and, in many cases, just now being tapped. While there is no doubt that the U.S. economy is heavily dependent on oil, he concluded, the Middle Eastern oil supply is available and right now is vital to our country. But the dependence will decrease in time as Earth's tremendous natural gas resources are increasingly used.

He made a good prediction about the increase of oil price in 2000 but I think he believes this is a temporary business cycle.