I'm not an expert (and I don't think you are)
Not by a long shot.
If we look at the supply side of a commodity like oil, we can identify or at least concieve of various reasons that supply might not be able to meet demand. It might be the case that there's simply not enough oil in the ground to meet increased demand. It might be the case that we lack the refining capacity to meet increased demand. It might be the case that oil is located in countries with governments who use it as a political weapon. It might be the case that oil is located in countries that are too unstable to properly supply at optimal levels. There are probaly more reasons.
Personally, I have no stake in the outcome. There's either enough oil for now and other problems, or there's not. As far as the peak oil thing goes, they seem to have been wrong so many times that it's like listening to the Jehova's Witnesses about judgement day. But maybe they'll be right eventually. I don't know, but it seems like industry people think that the oil is there but other factors are the problem.
Also, you have to factor in the falling dollar.
This post from Econobrowser (run by a liberal economics prof with an interest in energy) is informative:
And there were some important additional new developments just this week. On the positive side, Brazil announced the possibility of enormous new oil reserves. And for the pessimists, Russian oil production, whose increase has been a critical factor in world oil supplies up to this point, fell 1% in 2008:Q1.
Both of these stories are potentially huge developments. If both Russian and Saudi production have in fact peaked, the global peak cannot be far off, even if the Brazilian find is borne out. But I nevertheless am not persuaded that any of these news items is the primary explanation for the recent highs in oil prices.
The reason is that we're seeing similar increases since the start of the year in the price of virtually every storable commodity. The 12% increase in oil prices this year is in fact just the median for the group of 15 commodities graphed below. It seems to me we should be looking for a single explanation behind the common behavior of the group, rather than try to develop a separate theory for aluminum, barley, coffee, cocoa, copper, corn, cotton, gold, lead, oats, oil, silver, tin, and wheat....
I also find it implausible to attribute the commodity price increase to a surge in demand. The economic news over the last three months has been very convincing that output is slowing, not accelerating.
Instead I believe that the price of oil, like the price of all the other storable commodities, and for that matter the dollar cost of a euro, is primarily responding to the Fed's decision to move the real interest rate strongly into negative territory.