An industry organisation that includes Virgin and Yahoo has called on the government to "urgently" reassess its dismissive view about the potential threat and impact of oil shortages.

The call from the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security comes after revelations in the Guardian that there is dissent inside the International Energy Agency (IEA) about how soon the world may run out of supplies.

It also comes alongside a petition to Number 10 which calls on Gordon Brown to take up the issue more seriously amid a growing number of reports that indicate the situation is more urgent than many believed.

The Wicks Review into energy issues, published in August on behalf of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, gave scant regard to peak oil issues.

Will Whitehorn, the taskforce chairman, who is also president of Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson's space travel business, said: "Given the revelations from within the IEA, we hope the government will be urgently reviewing the complacent approach to peak-oil risk evident in the Wicks Review."

Other members of the taskforce include Scottish and Southern Energy, Stagecoach, the transport group, and Arup, the civil engineering consultancy. Work already undertaken by the taskforce has suggests that more needs to be done to prepare for the potential economic dislocation from a sudden huge rise in crude prices.

The IEA has dismissed as "groundless" the claims of whistleblowers that political pressure from the US is affecting the way in which future oil reserves and production figures are presented and analysed. The Paris-based organisation has argued that more than 200 oil experts have reviewed their numbers, leaving no scope for partisan views.

The debate was enlivened last Friday when Swedish academics unveiled their latest assessments of the numbers and came to even more gloomy assumptions. The study from Uppsala University entitled The Peak of the Oil Age estimated that by 2030 the world would be able to rely on only 75m barrels of oil a day, compared with the 105m forecast by the IEA.

Until relatively recently the agency was assuming the output figure would be as high as 120m and it still believes a peak of production could be reached in 2020, while Uppsala believes it might have already been reached.

Meanwhile a petition on the No 10 website has been launched, calling for Gordon Brown to take action in response to a recent report by the UK Energy Research Council, which talks of a "significant risk" of oil peaking before 2020.

The petition also refers to the 2005 Hirsch Report in the US, which has highlighted the decades-long timespan needed to transform oil-based infrastructure.

And while BP and others have said that there is plenty of oil for the next four decades, John Hess, the founder and chairman of the Hess Corporation, the US oil company, told a conference in London last month that a "devastating oil crisis" loomed on the horizon if global action was not taken quickly. Hess added: "If consuming nations led by the US commit to conserving energy through new automotive and building efficiency standards, we could save over five million barrels per day of incremental supply over the next ten years."