Tony Hayward, BP’s new chief executive, has been given a rave review by the markets for his plan to reshape the company he inherited from Lord Browne. (Helped, it must be said, by a new record oil price.)

In the full transcript of his interview, he agrees that what he wants is fewer accountants and more engineers. For a company that certainly seems to have been over-dominated by accountants, that must sound like a good thing. But accountants have their uses, especially if you are trying to control costs. BP’s share price stands at a deep discount to ExxonMobil’s for a reason, and part of that reason is that Mr Hayward has yet to prove that he can deliver the improved financial performance he wants. He may be saying all the right things, but cash says more about a company than strategy statements ever can.

Ukraine’s deal to settle its dispute with Gazprom over debts owed by its gas companies Rosukrenergo and Ukrgazenergo does not look great from Ukraine’s point of view.

The debts - which have mysteriously risen from $1.3bn to over $2bn - are to be paid off mainly in gas held in storage in Ukraine. Those comforting gas reserves were one reason why the threat to cut back supplies to Ukraine did not seem so frightening. Now those reserves will be lower.

The EU is still looking pretty comfortable: only in Italy is the danger of supply disruption creating genuine nervousness. That could make Ukraine look even more isolated if tensions flare up again.

It might have been better to have the fight now, than in the middle of winter.

UPDATE That dispute gave added edge to the energy security conference now on on Vilnius. Five countries - Ukraine, Poland, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Lithuania - agreed to form a consortium to advance their plan for an extension of Ukraine’s Odessa-Brody pipeline into Poland. (The Azeri take here, in slightly skewed but comprehensible English.) Ukraine’s president Viktor Yushchenko hailed what he called a "historic" agreement.

For years now, people have been predicting a wave of consolidation in the independent oil and gas sector, but it has never quite arrived. The bid approaches made by Eni of Italy and other to Burren Energy, a UK-listed independent producing oil in Congo-Brazzaville  and Turkmenistan, are interesting in their own right, but do not look like the trickle that is about to turn into a flood of offers.

Burren is negotiating from a position of strength. As Dresdner Kleinwort observed, it is a uniquely good fit for Eni, with a sizeable minority stake on the very promising M’Boundi field in Congo, where the Italian group is the operator, and a presence in Turkmenistan, one of the few resource-rich countries where the politics appear to be moving towards greater openness, rather in the opposite direction. Given the size of Eni’s headache in Kazakhstan, a bit of relief in a different country on the Caspian Sea might be particularly welcome. Eni’s £10.50 a share proposal is a big premium to the three-month average, but well below Tuesday’s close of £11.80. It looks as though Eni will have to go quite a lot higher to get Burren. DK suggested £13 a share might be possible.

Elsewhere in the sector, we have a couple of deals or potential deals under way in oil services, which make a lot of sense in such a cyclical industry, and a bit of action in Canada. That aside, there is not much going on. The high and volatile oil price seems to be one of the reasons. When oil is expensive, producers’ cash flows get boosted, allowing them to cling on the independence a while longer. Were oil to drop below $50 a barrel and stay there, many companies would be forced to reassess their prospects. Volatility is bad for deal-making, too, because it encourages divergent expectations among sellers and buyers; when their aspirations diverge, agreeing a price is difficult.

BG Group, for example, is often cited as a potential takeover target, most recently being named by a Brazilian magazine as the object of a potential joint approach from Royal Dutch Sell and Petrobras. It is very likely that Shell and its advisers ran their calculators over BG - it would be amazing if the had not - but it seems it would have been impossible to get the numbers to work in terms of making the deal earnings-enhancing for Shell’s shareholders. The involvement of Petrobras is unclear; it’s interest may have been a garbled rumour following BG’s success in finding oil and gas in very deep water off Brazil.

Chinese and Indian companies are always being suggested as possible bidders, for Burren or any other company. They have the money, and do not have to keep shareholders happy to the same degree that Western companies do. Oil Search of Papua New Guinea was the subject of persistent rumours - in the South China Morning Post, among other places - about an approach from CNPC Exploration of China. But after the Unocal fiasco, the Chinese companies seem cautious.

None of this means we won’t see any more bids coming in; the Burren saga certainly looks like it has got more twists yet to come. But before there is a big shake-out, conditions in the market will have to change. And that means an oil price that is more stable, or lower, or ideally both.

On Thursday, BP will apparently give some of the details of the planned restructuring to be launched by Tony Hayward, the new chief executive who took over unexpectedly rapidly at the beginning of May.

Since a story last month by my colleague Sheila McNulty, based on a leaked note of a staff meeting in Houston addressed by Mr Hayward, that announcement has been known to be imminent. And analysts are already beginning to talk it up as one of the things that they believe will mark a turn in the tide for BP.

It is not expected to be the sort of restructuring that results in large-scale redundancies, although some jobs may go. Instead, it is intended to rectify what is seen both inside and outside the company as an excessively complex, fragmented structure that was allowed to develop under Lord Browne, the previous chief executive. Bain has been called in to advise on making the organisational structure simpler.

After what will certainly be a pretty dismal set of third quarter results, if perhaps not quite "dreadful", things are beginning to look up for BP, with some key projects coming on stream. Greater Plutonio in Angola started production at the beginning of October, Atlantis in the Gulf of Mexico is on course to do the same before the end of the year. The refineries at Texas City and Whiting are set to get back to full capacity by next year. So even if Mr Hayward basically did nothing and coasted along for a bit, BP’s operational and financial performance would improve sharply over the next few months. Where he will earn his money, though, is if he manages to sustain that improvement.

Analysts are beginning to turn positive. As Neil McMahon of Sanford Bernstein put it - mixing his metaphors, but you get his point - "near term catalysts suggest that this ship is turning".

All the same, we should remember that launching a restructuring is the easy bit. Making it work will be much harder. And BP has been here before - several times - with past attempts to address what were seen as organisational weaknesses. Some of them ended up making matters worse, and are among the complexities that Mr Hayward now wants to undo.

The most entertaining and insightful take on Mr Hayward’s aspirations came from my eminent colleague Lucy Kellaway, picking up on our report that he had said he wanted a "leadership style that really listens". As she puts it: "Listening is only the first of four increasingly hard things leaders do. After they have listened, they must think. Then make a decision. Then implement. The fourth one is always the hardest." That is true in every company; it is true with a vengeance at BP.

Opec is to have a new member, it seems; or rather, an old one back again. Ecuador’s oil minister Galo Chiriboga said on Monday that after a 15-year absence his country intends to rejoin as soon as possible. Because Ecuador never formally quit, just let its membership lapse, all it has to do is pay a couple of years of fees that it owes: about $5m.

Ecuador, it must be remembered, is a minnow in oil terms, with output of a little over 0.5m barrels a day about half that of Opec’s lowest-producing members, Qatar and Indonesia. But getting a thirteenth member on board, following Angola last year, is another sign of Opec’s growing prestige and influence. After Ecuador, it is suggested, Sudan could be next.

We should not get carried away about the all-mighty Opec, however. Its attempt to curb oil prices that were heading towards $80 a barrel failed dismally. It seems Opec has the power to raise the price of oil, but not to cut it.

Sometimes you have to wonder whether people have any idea of the effort involved in making it possible for them to turn on the light or the central heating every day. Italy is a country that relies on gas to generate 60 per cent of its electricity, and on imports for 85 per cent gas. It is heavily dependent on Russia and Algeria  - two countries whose continued friendliness cannot necessarily be taken for granted - to continue functioning. So one would think that projects to increase the options for importing gas should be a no-brainer. Certainly that is what the European Commission seemed to think, when it backed the Brindisi LNG terminal being built by BG Group in the "heel" of Italy. In January, it identified the terminal as part of its priority interconnection plan, on which "urgent action" was needed.

Yet on October 5 Italy announced that it had suspended the permit for BG to keep working on the project, pending a fresh environmental impact assessment. The environment ministry put a curt statement to that effect (in Italian) on its website on Friday. That appears to mean a delay of at least three months, maybe more. Not that it matters all that much, of course, as the site has been closed since it was taken over by police as part of an inquiry into corruption allegations in February.

BG is far from being the only company to face problems. Even Eni, the national gas champion, has run into local opposition. This being Italy, of course, the government is not united. Pierluigi Bersani, the economy minister, backs the Brinidisi LNG development. But the strength of the opposition suggests

This at a time when Gazprom’s row with Ukraine over a $1.3bn debt has reawakened fears in all EU countries - Italy above all - about the vulnerability of their gas supplies. There are apparently fierce local objections in Brindisi. People are not opposed to LNG per se; they just don’t want it coming into their city. But with government ministires in Rome apparently prepared to support those objectors, the risk that the lights will go out - as Fulvio Conti, chief executive of Enel, has warned (in Italian again) - grows ever greater.

The government of Alberta is expected to decide within a week or so on possible changes to the oil and gas royalty regime, following recommendations from an independent panel that have become the subject of increasingly vocal protests from the industry. (The whole report from the Alberta Royalty Review Panel is available here.)

The review was commissioned as a result of pressure from politicians and campaign groups who argue that the massive oil reserves of the province - the largest anywhere in the developed world - have been more of a curse than a blessing. They say Alberta should at least be doing more to reap the benefits of its resources; the way, say, Russia or Algeria - or indeed the UK - have done.

Those pressures may yet be deflected; as the province’s energy minister told me a few months ago, it really does not want to kill off the development of the oil sands, one of the most important new frontiers for oil production. There is also local opposition to imposing higher taxes on the industry. Wood Mackenzie, the consultancy has suggested that implementing the report’s recommendations, in an area already plagued by high and rising costs, could have significant effects.

The real problems with the oil sands, however, have not yet hit bitten. Production is an energy-intensive business, and the greenhouse gas emissions caused by extraction are much higher than for conventional oil. The planned steep rise in production from the oil sands, to 4m barrels per day and beyond, would not be compatible with a serious attempt to reduce Canada’s emissions. Save the oil sands industry of save the climate? It may not be possible to do both.

StaoilHydro’s chairman Eivind Reiten has had one of the shortest tenures on record. Just four days into the life of his new company, created to be Norway’s national oil and gas champion, he has resigned, apparently as a result of information uncovered during the company’s investigation of its Libyan business.

Norsk Hydro, now mostly an aluminium company after Statoil bought all its oil and gas interests in the deal to create StatoilHydro, announced last year, has given a few details in its statements, first on Monday, when the investigation was revealed, and then on Thursday when Mr Reiten stood down. The Libyan business was previously part of Norsk Hydro, which picked it up when it bought Saga Petroleum in 1999.

Beyond that, we know very little, and for now it is hard to escape the feeling that Mr Reiten is paying the price for Norway’s exemplary standards in terms of transparency in the oil industry. Since the Statoil scandal of 2003, which claimed the jobs of the chairman and chief executive, Norway’s government has been at the forefront of the international fight against corruption, and StatoilHydro is more than 60 per cent government-owned.

Less than a week before Mr Reiten’s resignation, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a group that brings together companies, investors and NGOs, was hailing the agreement of 15 countries to implement its standards. At the same time, Norway became the first development country to say it would do likewise. In those circumstances, it would have been impossible for Mr Reiten to stay in his job. Caesar’s wife had to be above suspicion, and so do Norwegian oil bosses.

Romano Prodi, Italy’s prime minister, is off to Kazakhstan next week, apparently in an attempt to turn on the charm over Kashagan, the massive and deeply troubled oil project, where Eni of Italy is the under-performing operator. He might as well have a go; his sprinkling of diplomatic fairy dust has worked in the past, in Russia, for example. But Nursultan Nazarbayev and his allies are not going to get brought round with a side of prosciutto and a bottle of sambuca.

Mr Prodi’s problem is that the Kazakhs have really solid grounds for their grievances. Kashagan  has been horrendously delayed. First oil was originally due in 2005; now the consortium is aiming for the end of 2010, but some analysts see 2011 or 2012 as more realistic. That plus soaring costs, which the Eni-led group can recover from the oil the project produces, will have put back Kazakhstan’s payoff from this huge resource for the best part of a decade. True, the project faces awesome challenges, including the high levels of sulphur in the ground, but those challenges should have been better understood, and a more realistic development plan agreed between the consortium and the Kazakh government. When expectations are out of line, as they clearly were at Kashagan, resentment builds up and relationships break down.

Kazakhstan this week fined Chevron more than $600m for what seemed minor environmental infractions. While it has sounded rather more conciliatory on Kashagan in the past few days, Kazakhstan wants to show that it must be taken seriously. If Russia can do it, its leaders must think, then so can they.

Eni likes to talk the talk about partnerships and relationships with host countries, but it needs to walk the walk as well. At Kashagan, it failed to do that.

As I write, the state of Gazprom’s dispute with Ukraine remains unclear. The Russian company is declaring victory, but the government that has apparently agreed to pay Gazprom’s missing $1.3bn is the old one, not the new one that is expected to come to power after the elections at the weekend.

Further west, consumers who suddenly found they needed to know about Ukraine in January 2006, when the last dispute over gas supplies turned nasty, can afford to stay relaxed, for now at least. European gas prices have barely twitched. There is plenty of gas in storage - except in Italy - and the weather is warm. European solidarity with Ukraine, however earnestly expressed, will not have much political force behind it.

The worrying thing for Ukraine is that ten years from now, it could be even more isolated. At the moment, it is still a very important transit country: 80 per cent of Gazprom’s exports to Europe go through it. But Gazprom’s strategy is to by-pass transit countries as much as it can, with projects such as Nord Stream and South Stream. Even Nabucco, the EU’s favourite pipe-dream pipeline, might end up carrying quite a lot of Russian gas, through Turkey and into Austria. If those pipelines get built, Ukraine could be needed for only 40 per cent of Gazprom’s exports. And that will make choking off gas supplies that much easier.

By the way, if you want to know everything there is to know about gas in Ukraine, a great place to start is an excellent paper by Simon Pirani of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, available here.