There was a flurry of excitement in the oil market this afternoon when it appeared that France had decided to release oil from its strategic reserve. The truth was less dramatic: the government was actually releasing 285,000 tonnes  - about 2m barrels - of diesel and heating oil to offset problems at two refineries, and the oil was not coming from its strategic petroleum reserve.

All the same, the story raised the question of whether, given all the talk about whether today’s oil price is a speculative bubble, US and other governments should release enough oil from their reserves to give the speculators a bloody nose. If they succeed, they can replenish their stockpiles at much lower prices.

The history of currency interventions suggests they are most successful when markets have got far out of line with fundamentals, and intervention acts as a slap in the face to bring the market back to reality. Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates argues that oil prices are becoming "decoupled from the fundamentals of supply and demand." If he is right, then an intervention in the oil market just might work.

It would, admittedly, be a gamble. When all the commercial players seem to want to be long of oil, it would be a brave energy minister who decided to go short. Much better to get Opec to do the job for them. 

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.

One interesting aspect of the Gaz de France / Suez deal, on which our Paris bureau chief Peggy Hollinger has been leading the world, is its effect on competition in European energy markets. For Electricite de France, in a French residential energy market newly opened up to competition, the deal creates a potentially threatening "dual fuel" competitor, with 10m GDF customers who could be sold Suez’s electricity.

The merger also points to a way forward for companies worried about the drive towards energy market liberalisation coming from the European Commission. GDF makes about two thirds of its profits from its transmission and distribution networks. If it loses control of the transmission business as a result of the EU’s drive for "unbundling" those networks, it will urgently need new sources of revenue. Other national champions, similarly threatened, may find GDF’s solution attractive.

As is so often the case, one deal seems likely to spur others.

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.

An interesting post at the Oil Drum by Jerome Guillet, writing as Jerome a Paris, on Russia and European energy security, describing the argument that energy liberalisation is an answer to the EU’s dependence on Russian gas as "the usual insane crap." He also had a piece in the FT in February, making the same point in rather more diplomatic language. (FT pieces may require subscription)

As far as I can see, however, he fails to demonstrate his point. How national champions such as GDF and Eni signing long-term supply deals with Gazprom helps ease Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, I really don’t know. On the contrary, it is the UK market, the most liberalised in Europe, that is opening the fastest to new sources of gas from sources including Norway and Qatar. The bottom line, surely, is that history, geography and geology mean that Europe is and will continue to be heavily dependent on Russian gas for the forseeable future. The best it can do is try to give itself as many credible alternatives as possible.

He argues for greater energy efficiency and diversity of supply away from gas and coal, presumably to nuclear and renewables. Those are all excellent ideas. But they can be delivered in a liberalised market. The obstacles to new nuclear build in countries that will really need it, including Germany, Italy, and Spain, are nothing to do with the financing problems created by more liberalised energy markets, and all about politics, as this post on the Nuclear Eenergy Institute blog suggests.