There is a 'significant risk' that global oil production will peak in less than ten years' time, say researchers in a report from the UK Energy Research Centre.

The report's authors add there is a growing consensus that the age of cheap oil is coming to an end.

But they warn that governments, including the UK's, are not concerned about global oil depletion, despite the fact that oil provides a third of the world's energy.

As the modern industrial world is largely built on the availability of cheap oil, this is likely to have a huge impact on the global economy.

The whole issue of peak oil has long been contentious. A growing number of commentators say the world is near peak oil production, predicting that oil will run out as reserves become more and more depleted. Others argue we have enough oil to see us well into the twenty-first century.

'Just ten oil fields provide 20 per cent of the world's oil. They're old fields and many of these are past their peak.'
Jamie Speirs, UK Energy Research Centre

Since 2003, rising oil prices and demand, as well as declining production in key oil producing regions like the Middle East, has increased concerns about oil security.

'Just ten oil fields provide 20 per cent of the world's oil. They're old fields and many of these are past their peak,' says Jamie Speirs, one of the report's authors.

The report warns that new discoveries like the ones announced recently in the Gulf of Mexico, will only delay the peak by a matter of days or weeks.

But the report concludes that few new giant fields are expected to be found. 'Discovery peaked in the early 60s. Since then, new oil fields have got smaller and smaller,' says Speirs.

To maintain production at current levels, we'd have to have the amount of oil that Saudi Arabia produces coming on stream every three years, say the authors. This means we need to find alternatives.

But many commentators believe that alternative sources might not plug the gap quickly enough.

'We're concerned that high oil prices resulting from a peak in production might encourage countries to start converting non-liquid fuels like coal to liquid fuels to plug the gap. These techniques are carbon intensive and will only put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, making climate change worse,' adds Speirs.

Governments struggling to tackle the effects of climate change as well as the fallout from peak oil might wonder which is more important.

'If we don't deal with climate change and peak oil at the same time, we're going to have problems. You can't fix one without considering the other,' says Speirs.

The authors reviewed a number of reports in an effort 'to provide a consensus in a contentious debate'. But the data they used varied hugely. Some came from publicly-available sources, while some came from areas where numbers are not necessarily verified.

Data sources from oil producing countries are not always reliable, which makes 'anticipating a forthcoming peak far from straightforward.' Confounding things even further, data from countries producing the most oil, like Saudi Arabia, provides the greatest difficulties.

A quarter of the world's crude oil is provided by just 25 of the 70,000 working oil fields, while half of the world's supply is provided by only 100 oil fields.