With the natural gas demand impacts from former Hurricane Florence’s destruction in the Carolinas appearing less pronounced than previously predicted, shortly before 9 a.m. ET the October futures contract was trading about 2.1 cents higher Monday morning at around $2.788/MMBtu.

After making landfall with the Carolinas late last week and dropping catastrophic amounts of rain over the weekend, as of 5 a.m. ET Monday Florence had weakened into a tropical depression, according to the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.

The storm was hovering over southwestern Virginia traveling north-northeast at close to 13 mph, carrying maximum sustained winds of around 30 mph, forecasters said.

Most of the demand destruction from Florence centered around power demand in North Carolina, according to Genscape Inc. analyst Josh Garcia.

“Demand in Virginia and the Carolinas has already begun recovering, with aggregate sample demand up about 240 MMcf/d day/day from the low of 3.42 Bcf/d on Saturday,” Garcia said. “Prior to Florence’s arrival, aggregate demand had averaged 4.40 Bcf/d and maxed at 4.86 Bcf/d.”

As of Monday morning, Duke Energy was reporting close to 325,000 customers still affected by power outages in its Carolinas territory in the aftermath of Florence. On Sunday, the utility said it had already restored power to more than 830,000 customers out of roughly 1.3 million total outages.

“While Florence was deadly, the winds from the storm were not nearly as strong as feared last week,” EBW Analytics Group CEO Andy Weissman told clients Monday. “As of early this morning, fewer than 500,000 customers were without power in North and South Carolina combined — less than 20% of the three million customers utility officials had warned were at risk due to the storm.

“In addition, power will be restored to many of these customers within the next 24-48 hours, further reducing the loss of natural gas demand anticipated due to the storm,” he said. “After Friday’s losses, this less-than-anticipated impact is likely to trigger a modest rebound, especially since the near-term forecast warmed significantly over the weekend.”

Patterns are shaping up to deliver above-average gas-weighted degree days (GWDD) into October, according to Bespoke Weather Services.

Weekend guidance trended warmer in the medium-term, but “at this time of year that can pull GWDDs slightly lower overall…if heat is not focused in the right places, and many of the warmer trends were across the Midwest into the Northeast where cold did not appear as intense as it looked last week,” Bespoke said. “Yet we still saw lingering cooling demand across the South and the Southeast for much of this time outside of cooler trends in the South around Sept. 28.

“Additionally, we see increased trough risk across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic in the long-range that should boost heating demand as well, meaning even if on net we lost a few GWDDs this weekend the weather picture should be about as supportive as Friday with no significant changes.”

October crude oil futures were trading about 49 cents higher at around $69.48/bbl, while October RBOB gasoline was up about 2 cents to around $1.9898/gal.