It didn’t take long for those predicting that May swing priceswould remain under index levels all month to have to eat theirwords. Not all points matched indexes again Tuesday, but quite afew did in a general show of strength by the cash market, and therest were coming close. Most gains were in the vicinity of a dime,but those in the Rockies and California markets tended to be closerto a nickel or so.

Sources mostly credited “following the screen” higher for thecash upticks because, as one Gulf Coast trader put it, “there’sbeen no change in relatively weak fundamentals.” Cash had a wake-upcall from the futures trading pit to answer, he said. Cash marketactivity was sort of lethargic at first but then drove priceshigher throughout the rest of the morning, he added. His Henry Hubdeals began at $2.28 and wound up at $2.34.

Somewhat fittingly, since its dime-plus increases Monday hadsharply contrasted with a mostly softer market that day, San JuanBasin registered Tuesday’s lowest gains of about 2-3 cents.Maintenance outages ended at Williams Field Services’ Ignacio Plantand BP Amoco’s Florida Plant, putting a huge chunk of San Juan gasback up for grabs for today’s gas flow.

Though the volumes weren’t all that big, a marketer reportedseeing “fairly good buying” into El Paso by all the California andeast-of-California utilities. Besides the screen influence, he felta lot of buyers may have entered May with short supply positionsbecause they expected lower swing pricing, “and now they’re findingprices not quite as soft as they thought.”

A Midcontinent source was hearing predictions of 40-50 Bcf ininjections for AGA’s report this afternoon of storage activity lastweek. “Anything close to zero will start a bull run, and anythingnear 100 will let the bears run loose,” but it will take extremessuch as that to have any significant impact on the market, he said.

The Northwest Pipeline bulletin board Tuesday reported a withdrawalof more than 100 MMcf from the Jackson Prairie storage facility duringMonday’s gas day, similar to last week’s activity (see Daily GPI, April 29). That wasn’t hard tounderstand, though, a marketer said, since the Pacific Northwest isstill seeing both heating and power generation load because of chillyweather and a related delay in strong hydropower production.

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