A number of theorists believe some peak in world oil production has already occurred. Colin Campbell of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) has calculated that the global production of conventional oil peaked in the spring of 2004 albeit at a rate of 23-GB/yr, not Hubbert's 13-GB/yr. Another peak oil proponent Kenneth S. Deffeyes predicted in his book Beyond Oil - The View From Hubbert's Peak that global oil production would hit a peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005 (Deffeyes has since revised his claim, and now argues that world oil production peaked on December 16 2005).

Setting off alarm bells around the world, after Hurricane Katrina, Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, claimed that it simply could not increase production to make up for crude output losses sustained due to the Gulf of Mexico oil rigs shutdown. Furthermore, in April, 2006, a Saudi Aramco spokesman admitted that its mature fields are now declining at a rate of 8% per year, and its composite decline rate of producing fields is about 2%, implying that Saudi Arabia may have peaked. Additionally, Mexico announced that its giant Cantarell field entered depletion in March, 2006, as did the huge Burgan field in Kuwait in November, 2005.

Nor is the crisis restricted to petroleum. Traditional natural gas supplies are also under the constraints of production peaks, which especially affect specific geographic regions because of the difficulty of transporting the resource over long distances. Natural gas production may have peaked on the North American continent in 2003, with the possible exception of Alaskan gas supplies which cannot be developed until a pipeline is constructed. Natural gas production in the North Sea has also peaked. UK production was at its highest point in 2000, and declining production and increased prices are now a sensitive political issue there. Even if new extraction techniques yield additional sources of natural gas, like coalbed methane, the energy returned on energy invested will be much lower than traditional gas sources, which inevitably leads to higher costs to consumers of natural gas.

There are some countries that have already passed their oil production peak.

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