Though some dismiss them as crude-oil Cassandras, the peak-oilers are not wild-eyed pessimists. Their number includes men like T. Boone Pickens, the Dallas oil tycoon, and Houston’s Matt Simmons, who founded the world’s largest energy investment banking company. They point to hard data indicating that the world is quite simply running out of oil and doing so quickly…

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.

The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 - much earlier than most experts had expected. The report, which predicts that production will now fall by 7% a year, comes after oil prices set new records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting more than $90 (£44) a barrel.

A number of analysts are saying that peak oil is here now. Suppose they are correct – what kind of changes can we expect to see in the years ahead?

In this chapter, we will look at the implications of peak oil now – how we can expect oil production to change between now and 2030, and how this decline in production is likely to affect the economy.

Oil supplies may fall short of demand by 13 million barrels a day by 2030, according to a study led by former Exxon Mobil Corp. chairman Lee Raymond and based on forecasts from the world’s largest oil companies

Data collected from as many as 12 international oil companies showed global production may reach 105 million to 110 million barrels a day by 2030. That’s as much as 11 percent below US government forecasts for 118 million barrels a day of demand. The report was approved yesterday by the National Petroleum Council, an advisory group that conducted the study in response to a request from US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.

“We need energy efficiency, we need to moderate the rate of growth of demand,” Bodman said after the report was released. “We need diversity of suppliers and of supplies.”

Proponents of “peak oil” – the theory that global crude oil production has hit its zenith and is headed for a steep decline – are steamed with a U.S. oil industry group’s findings that the world has plenty of oil.

Next week the U.S. National Petroleum Council – a board of high-level U.S. oil industry executives – releases its study titled “Facing the Hard Truths about Energy,” conducted at the behest of Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.

According to the report’s executive summary obtained by Reuters, the world is not running out of oil but there are “accumulating risks” to securing supply through 2030.