David O’Reilly, the chief executive of Chevron, is this week’s guest on the FT’s view from the top video. If you would rather read than watch, there is also a transcript. He has plenty of valuable insights, including thoughts on the current prices of energy assets, relations with China after the Cnooc / Unocal saga, climate change policy, and the future of the oil majors in the face of competition from alternative energy.

A few particular nuggets stand out: he identifies Arctic exploration as "an area of focus for the company", but sounds pretty cautious about Iraq. "There [has to be] a set of laws and regulations that will govern how one makes investments there, and secondly, there has to be security, and neither of those are in place yet," he says.

And on the price of oil, he places his bet: $100 a barrel crude is not likely in five years, he thinks, but it is likely in ten years.

Russia has reacted in predictably robust manner to the FT’s story about how the European Commission is mulling over a range of ideas for keeping Gazprom and other non-EU companies from taking control of strategic energy assets.

The Commission’s ideas, set out in a confidential working paper seen by the FT’s sister paper FT Deutschland, do not have a tremendous ring of conviction to them: the agenda in Brussels is still set by competitiveness, not security. The point of the paper seems to be to find ways for for the Commission to secure its flank against criticism that it is endangering energy security, while its main thrust is still aimed at promoting competition by "unbundling" the national energy champions.

The threat of demanding reciprocity from companies seeking to buy strategic energy assets is a familiar one. As the old joke has it, everyone thinks that everyone else has to show reciprocity, but they never want it for themselves. But using the principle as a way to keep out the Russians may not be easy. In spite of the high-profile cautionary stories such as Sakhalin 2 and Kovykta, not every western company finds it is being pushed back in Russia. Not in the electricity industry, certainly: just ask Enel.

All the same, there is no doubt that since the Ukraine gas crisis 18 months ago, Europe has viewed Russia  in a very different light. If Gazprom tries to buy Centrica or RWE, you can bet some way will be found to block it.