Maybe its just me but in my line of work the players have become huge multi national. The reason behind the mergers was the high cost of developing new mines. Therefore it was cheaper to buy smaller companies with reserves rather than develop new ones.
The new bigger fish in the shrinking pond can turn big proffits from doing nothing so why risk money exploring on anything that isn't a sure thing? Disaplin is the name of the game produce only what you know you can make long term money
Non ecconomic producers from the past on the other hand do have an incentive to increase producion because things that in the past didn't contribute much to the bottom line now do. A good example is Sumitomo Metal Mining. A light weight in the mining buisness but big in smelting, they found a niche in refining waste producst like fly ash from other metal compnaies to extract nickel. At 5 dollars a pound this doesn't makes sence, but at 12 it does. And nickel pig iron is another example some Chinese companies do. Sure you can extract nickel from Laterite ore with convensional blast furnace technolgy but this isn;t a way to actulay increase the amount of metal it just takes the edge off 20 dollar nickel and makes it a slightly less insane 15....
Why should the oil buisness be any different from mining?
It seems that the mining buisness followed the lead of the oil companies, in fact some of them like BHP&B and Teck Cominco have gotton into the oil buisness off shore ( Neptune for BHP, Tar sands for Teck ).
So yes I can see small players in the energy buisness moving in but they realy don't make a difference.
Like you ever heard of Teck Cominco?
??
I can't realy argue any points about peak oil I'm not an expert, but I believe we are seeing peaks in other things like Nickel, PMGs and special rare earth metals ( that I have better insight into ).
Save oil for plastics, well I guess thats better than burning it all