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As Burma’s ruling junta cracks down on protesters, killing nine yesterday, calls to do more to put pressure on the regime in terms of financial sanctions are growing, and putting the spotlight on the role played by Total and Chevron. They are partners in the Yadana natural gas project, which last year produced almost half of Burma’s gas, and is said to deliver up to $400m a year in government revenues.

Total, which leads the project, has engaged extensively with its critics, but this week again rejected the idea of pulling out.

By a quirk of history, France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, wrote a report on Burma for Total back in 2003. It commissioned him to give an independent view of its involvement when he was a human rights consultant. The report is available at the extensive section of Total’s corporate website detailing the company’s position on Burma.

Chevron, meanwhile, has been keeping a low profile. It acquired its stake somewhat accidentally, when it bought Unocal in 2005. Texaco, later bought by Chevron, pulled out of Burma in 1997. Total seems rather more  accustomed to  dealing with controversial regimes.

Burma’s gas resources - not massive but not insignificant either, as the BP review of energy shows - are certainly a complicating factor in dealing with the regime. Thailand is the biggest buyer of its gas exports, and China and to a lesser extent India have been moving in, too, and their companies are a lot less susceptible to public opinion than Total or Chevron. When it argues that things would be worse if it pulled out, Total may well be right.

Kazakhstan is stepping up the pressure on foreign oil companies, with the parliament approving a bill that would give the state the power to strike out contracts for oil, gas and other resources. Politics in Kazakhstan being what they are, the bill seems certain to become law. (FT stories may require subscription.)

It raises the pressure on Eni and its partners at Kashagan, which are facing an October 22 deadline to settle the dispute over the projects’s costs and the distribution of revenues.

David Thomas of Citigroup, in a recent note, suggested the threat to kick out the Eni-led consortium was hollow.

"While the new law, if passed, would theoretically allow the Kazakh government to cancel the existing Kashagan production sharing agreement, we believe this would be highly unlikely since there are no viable options available to accelerate the technically complex and capitally intensive development of the giant Kashagan field," he wrote.

All the same, the mere possibility, however remote the threat is, will certainly concentrate minds at Eni and its partners.

The Wall Street Journal has a colourful story about MangistauMunaiGaz, or MMG, Kazakhstan’s fifth-largest oil producer. The company is worth $4bn-plus, the story suggests. But with the poltical climate worsening, and MMG’s ownership opaque, it would be a brave western company that took the plunge. The Chinese companies seem more likely bidders.

Meanwhile, the signs from neighbouring Turkmenistan are rather more positive, although it is still early days for most western majors.

Opec officials struggling to explain why oil promptly surged to $80 a barrel after its attempt to cool the market with a 500,000 barrel a day production increase pointed to the attacks on gas and oil installations in Mexico on Monday as part of the reason why the group’s efforts had been ineffectual.

This Reuters story points out that these attacks are a worrying sign, in a country that is one of the world’s top ten oil producers, even if it has been in decline.

As Adam Sieminski, chief energy economist of Deutsche Bank, is quoted as saying in that piece: "If it gets worse, it would likely have a more significant impact on the global markets."

It did not take long for the oil market to deliver its verdict on Opec’s production increase. Just over 24 hours after the announcement that the goup would pump an extra 500,000 barrels a day, oil has surged to a new record of $80 a barrel.

Technical factors are part of it. Traders say there are big speculative positions in call options that will pay off above $80, and the hedge funds want to force the price up so they can collect.

But it also sheds an interesting light on the power of Opec. The economist James Hamilton makes a persuasive argument that Opec is not "a functioning cartel", but instead "a group of countries loosely announcing what individually they’d each pretty much want to do on their own anyway." (His work on Saudi Arabia’s oil production and potential is also interesting, although highly contentious.)

In a sense,it helps Opec to dispel its image as a sinister all-powerful cartel that can hold the world to ransom. The ministers always say: "we do not set the price"; the past 24 hours have proved their point. On the other hand, being exposed as ineffectual cannot be good for Opec either.

The timing was unhelpful, to say the least. As Javier Blas reports, the day after Opec agreed to raise its production, the International Energy Agency said the world would need less oil in the second half of the year than it had previously thought. It has cut its estimate of demand in the fourth quarter, which is when the Opec output hike will take effect, by 250,000 barrels a day to 87.8m, and cut its forecast of the "call on Opec" even more, by 300,000 b/d. That is not really the best possible support for the IEA’s argument that Opec should have done more. (The headlines from today’s IEA oil market report are on its site, although full details are not available to the public for another two weeks.)

However, even the IEA’s new prediction of fourth quarter demand is still some 700,000 b/d above Opec’s own  If the IEA is right, the market that is already tight, as Opec’s head of research Hasan Qabazard put it (watch the video here), will get even tighter. The reaction of the oil market suggests that no-one is worrying about flagging demand just yet.

Yet the IEA’s decision to cut its demand forecast was a result largely of a lower baseline being set by the numbers for June and July, when there was mild weather and some switching away from oil to other fuels. If the subprime crisis begins have a significant effect on global growth, then the oil market may look very different. As the IEA says "we may further revise our 2008 forecast as events unfold."

So we have the answers to the questions we posed during the day, here and here.

Opec did raise production, suprising some, but not anyone who listened to PFC Energy last week. (FT stories may require a subscription). And the 500,000 barrel a day increase was from current production of about 26.75m b/d, not the officially agreed level of 25.85m set at Abuja last December.

However, the International Energy Agency, which tries to do for oil consumers what Opec does for the producers, described the move as "a smaller increase than we would have liked," even if it was more than anyone would have expected a few weeks ago. And the reaction in the markets has been to push US crude up by about 80 cents, as of mid-afternoon New York time.

One factor in the market reaction may be the type of crude that Opec will be adding to the market. Its oil is sour - ie higher in sulphur - so it needs more refining to be turned into usable products, and in the US in particular, refinery capacity is in short supply. So the effect of today’s announcement for US light sweet crude prices - the West Texas Intermediate benchmark, for example - may be limited.

If the world stays out of recession, and oil demand holds up, expect the same pressure on Opec for another move at the next ministerial meeting, in Abu Dhabi on December 5, or even earlier, at the Opec summit in Riyadh on November 17-18.

As I write – about 10am European time - Opec ministers in Vienna are still debating whether to announce an increase in oil production. The comments of the ministers and officials arriving for a working breakfast with non-Opec countries earlier this morning were less than illuminating. The most telling was from Abdallah el-Badri, Opec’s secretary-general, who described near-$80 oil as a “problem”.

His choice of word shows how the caricature of Opec as short-term revenue maximisers is misplaced, and does a lot to explain why a production increase is now on the table.

There has been a lot of talk (including in the FT) about the how Opec remembers the Jakarta meeting in November 1997, when a rise in production was followed by the coincidence of the Asian financial crisis with two warm winters, which drove oil down to $10.

But there is another parallel that is perhaps more relevant – and particularly apposite today, on the sixth anniversary ‑ the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when Opec, led by Saudi Arabia, helped steady nerves by promising that the oil would keep flowing. The group raised its production in January 2003, after Venezuela’s production was disrupted by a strike. (FT stories may require subscription.)

The financial turmoil resulting from the subprime crisis has been less dramatic, of course. But its economic implications could ultimately be more profound. Today is a chance for Opec to join the US Federal Reserve and the other central banks and authorities in playing its part in keeping the world economy out of recession.

PetroChina, the listed but state-controlled Chinese energy group, has signed a 15-year, $37bn deal to buy liquefied natural gas from Woodside Petroleum’s planned Browse project in Australia. The deal follows a similar 20-year contract signed a couple of days ago with Royal Dutch Shell for LNG from Chevron’s Gorgon project, also off Australia, in which Shell has a stake. (FT stories may require subscription)
In the past few years - since oil prices started to rise - the main action in China has been in coal; the country has been putting on coal-fired electricity generation capacity at a rate equivalent to a good-sized new power station every week.
The fact that China is now trying to tie up gas supplies, at prices apparently well above what it was prepared to pay in 2002, suggests it has caught on to the prevailing thinking in energy-importing countries in the West: above all it is diversity of supply that fosters security.
It is also evidence of what looks like a looming global shortage of LNG. With the delays hitting projects such as Gassi Touil in Algeria (where the government is kicking out Repsol, the operator), and demand growing at double-digit rates, it looks as though there is not going to be enough LNG to go round.

Hubris and nemesis department. On Tuesday, I sat in a hall at the Offshore Europe conference hearing Xavier Preel of Total waxing lyrical about the French oil major’s superior project execution and host country relationships; on Wednesday morning, his boss Christophe de Margerie was admitting that Total’s production growth projections have been over-optimistic.

As the FT story explains, it is not all Total’s own fault. Higher oil prices mean more oil goes to Total’s partners in production sharing contracts, which accounts for about half the cut in projected output. And a slowdown from 5 per cent to 4 per cent average annual volume growth during 2006-10 is hardly devastating: Total will still comfortably beat BP and Royal Dutch Shell over that period, and perhaps even ExxonMobil. (FT stories may require subscription.)

And yet, Total’s admission is an important piece of news. It is yet more evidence of the severity challenge facing the oil majors, and shows how difficult it is to buck the trend, however good you may think you are. It is also another reason why there will be a few barrels more missing from forecasts of oil supply out to the end of the decade, and another reason why - barring a global economic downturn - prices are likely to stay high.   

UPDATE: Total has some good documentation and a webcast presentation on its website.

At Offshore Europe in Aberdeen, the biggest oil and gas trade show outside the US, the dominent theme has been the struggle for international oil companies to find a role for themselves in a world where governments and national oil companies control the resources, and services companies very often control the skills and the technology.

Malcolm Brinded, Royal Dutch Shell’s executive director of exploration and production, and Robert Olsen, chairman of ExxonMobil International, came up with very similar answers: the IOCs need to offer the most advanced technology and the most sophisticatred skills, especially in project management, or they are dispensible. As Mr Brinded put it, the oil majors are not needed by resource-rich countries any more, so they have to make themselves wanted.

The most interesting take, though, came from Xavier Preel of Total, who talked about his company’s vision of "a new relationship with governments and national oil companies" based on "mutual understanding and respect". He made it very clear that that as far as Total was concerned, there was no argument over who had the upper hand in that relationship.

It is all a long way from John D Rockefeller. Still, in the case of the recent Shtokman deal with Gazprom, for example, it appears to work. (FT stories require subscription.)

If anyone needed a reminder of the way things are going, Algeria helpfully gave Repsol a slap in the face on Monday. And in remarks the FT reported back in June, its government has made very clear the way it believes the industry is going.

However, one of the crucial issues in Algeria’s decision on the Repsol gas project seems to have been the cost overruns and delays that have hit it. An IOC might have the silkiest diplomatic skills in the world, but if it cannot deliver projects on time and on budget and delivering the returns that its partner expected, it will be in trouble.