A tropical depression formed quickly Tuesday afternoon from whathad appeared to be no more than a disorganized bunch ofthunderstorms in the morning. A storm warning was issued forpractically the entire coast of Texas (Brownsville to High Island).Although a mid-afternoon spot check of some larger producersindicated mostly a “keeping an eye on things” attitude rather thanactual platform evacuations, it was likely that tentative planswere turning into concrete action that evening.

Cash prices rose in a range of about 5-10 cents at Easternpoints. The Southwest basins, Southern California border and acouple of Rockies pipes saw the same type of firmness, but Malin,the PG&E citygate and other Rockies points were flat to onlyslightly higher. And numbers for intra-Alberta plunged into theC$1.40s. One source said constraints at provincial export pointswere backing gas up into Alberta and causing high-linepackconditions on NOVA.

One source thought just the potential for a Gulf storm wasresponsible for a big run-up on the futures screen, and that inturn helped pull cash along with it. Also, a producer noted thatpayback to the Gulf pipelines for last week’s hurricane-relatedsupply outages will keep buying pressure up for some time to come.

Northern market-area weather had little to contribute to gasprice firmness. The official end of summer is still a couple ofweeks away, but for many people Labor Day symbolizes the end oftheir summers, so it was fitting that post-holiday weather in theMidwest and Northwest was autumn-like. But although it was coolenough for sweater-wearing, as a Houston trader who spent theweekend in upper Michigan related, it wasn’t cool enough to fire upmany furnaces yet.

A Midcontinent trader said it was a lot hotter over the weekendthan many people had expected, so he thought some of the region’sprice strength was due to imbalance resolution demand.

As of 4:45 p.m. CDT Shell had evacuated about 250 workers in thewestern Gulf of Mexico. Amoco reported pulling about 30″less-essential” personnel from offshore facilities, also in thewestern Gulf and mostly in the Matagorda Bay area, but had not madeany shut-ins as of late Tuesday afternoon. Chevron said it was in”what we call a pre-Phase I” stage, which basically meant makingplans for evacuations but not actually taking anyone ashore yetexcept for some “non-essentials” from the deepwater facilities thatare far out in the Gulf. A couple of other producers said theyweren’t evacuating anyone yet but were monitoring the situation.(Again, Daily GPI’s check was made in the afternoon when conditionsand possibly planning were changing rapidly.)

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