Between the Broadsheets

The Prime Minister will send a tough message to the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday, warning of imminent sanctions on oil and gas if he does not abandon his nuclear ambitions.
In a landmark speech to the Israeli parliament, Mr Brown will say that Mr Ahmadinejad's denial of Israel's right to exist is "totally abhorrent". - The Daily Telegraph

The cost of fuelling Britain’s Armed Forces is due to rise by more than £500 million next year as a result of soaring oil prices, forcing military chiefs to consider broad cuts to air force and combat training.
Ministry of Defence calculations of projected fuel bills, seen by The Times, show a dramatic increase in operating costs, with fuel for aircraft, naval and ground vehicles up by more than 20 per cent on last year. - The Times

Gordon Brown will today increase the pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear programme by condemning as “totally abhorrent” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel.
Tehran faces a series of sanctions against its oil and gas industries unless it halts attempts to develop its atomic capability within two weeks, senior British diplomats said last night. - The Times

ROBERT DUDLEY, the embattled chief executive of TNK-BP, has accused the group’s Russian shareholders of “deliberately polarising the organisation along nationalistic lines” and warned that their efforts to oust him “will surely destroy value in our company”. - The Times

Regulators are rather shadowy figures in the world of business. They avoid the limelight, they prefer to let the numbers do the talking. In an ideal world, perhaps, their field of interest would be so well-behaved that you would never hear of them at all - they invariably become well known only when something goes wrong. On that score, then, the fact that Regina Finn would not be recognised in the street is a good thing. - The Times

Oil production in non-Opec countries is set to peak within the next two years, leaving the world increasingly dependent on supplies from the cartel of exporting nations, according to one of the world's leading energy experts.
Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said that falling production from key regions such as the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico would leave international oil companies such as Shell and BP increasingly sidelined at the expense of national oil companies, such as Saudi Aramco. - The Times

THE oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to sell its stake in the £2.5 billion London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, to Eon and Dong Energy, its former partners.
Under a settlement reached last week, the utilities agreed to divide Shell’s one-third stake evenly between them. Eon and Dong will now own 50% each. - The Times

A lack of adequate gas storage has left Britain's energy market like a “house of cards”, more vulnerable to supply shocks than any other country in Western Europe, according to a leading energy analyst.
Four years after becoming a net gas importer, Britain still has one of the lowest levels of gas storage capacity in Europe - enough to supply consumers for about two weeks. That is equivalent to about 4 per cent of annual demand, compared with 20 per cent in both France and Germany. - The Times

AUSTRALIAN group Energy Developments has hired RBC Capital Markets to auction its £200m UK landfill-gas business.
The company, known as EDL, expects the sale to be hotly contested by utilities and financial buyers keen to increase the proportion of power generation that comes from renewable resources. - The Times

THE Hollywood A-lister Robert Redford has waded into the controversy over plans to build the UK’s first new coal-fired power station in three decades.
The actor sent a letter of support last week to the World Development Movement (WDM), one of the campaign groups planning a mass demonstration at E.ON’s 2,000MW power plant near Kingsnorth, Kent, next month.
Camp for Climate Action, the group that stormed Heathrow to protest against plans for a third runway, has promised to invade and shut down the plant that provides power for 1.5m homes in the area. - The Times

The row surrounding BP's Russian joint venture intensified last night after it emerged that one of its billionaire partners had written a letter to try to prevent the chief executive of TNK-BP from obtaining a visa to remain in the country.
Viktor Vekselberg, who has taken a back seat in the battle between BP and the Alfa-Access-Renova (AAR) consortium, urged the Federation Migration Service not to renew Robert Dudley's visa. Should the Russian migration department follow Mr Vekselberg's request, Mr Dudley would be expelled by the end of the week. - The Daily Telegraph

America's energy-trading fraternity appears to be on a collision course with a group of leading politicians determined to curbs what they see as excessive speculation in the oil markets.
Senior Democratic senators, led by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, are determined to pass a new bill which would limit the stakes speculators can take in the oil and gas markets. - The Daily Telegraph

An oil minnow quoted on London's Alternative Investment Market will this week announce the beginning of the largest new production of oil in Syria for up to 20 years.
Gulfsands Petroleum, which has a stock market capitalisation of just £240m, will begin extracting "first oil" at the initially modest rate of 10,000 barrels per day. - The Daily Telegraph

Expansion of the world's off-shore wind power industry could create up to 30,000 manufacturing jobs in the North-east and bring in £3bn of investment, the Government's Energy Minister will say today.
Malcolm Wicks is in Gateshead and Northumberland to open the site where the world's largest wind turbine – a mammoth 7.5 megawatt installation that will stand 10 times higher than the Angel of the North – is to be developed at the region's New and Renewable Energy Centre (NaREC) by Clipper Wind, the Californian energy giant. - The Independent

A Russian-born scientist living in the U.S. state of Tennessee believes he may have found a solution to rising petrol costs – a cheap way to produce hydrogen.
Biology Professor Sergey Markov from Austin Peay State University has discovered a way to produce hydrogen fuel for vehicles by using photosynthetic bacteria. - Russia Today