Overall prices for the weekend softened in Friday’s trading, butsome sizeable rebounds were occurring towards mid-morning as cashfollowed the screen back up after having previously followed itlower, several traders said.

Quotes ranged from flat on CNG-Appalachia to more than $2 lowerin Transco’s Zone 6-NYC pool, with most of the declines between anickel and 15 cents. However, with wind chill factors expected tobe around zero degrees over the weekend, New England citygatesbucked the softening trend with gains that reached almost 50 centsin Tennessee Zone 6. Texas Eastern’s M-3 pool, which feeds a lot ofgas into downstream affiliate Algonquin, saw a moderate rise.

The cash market fell because of both the usual drop in weekendloads and the screen’s early slump, a marketer said. However,”we’re still above index at most points,” he noted, predicting thatprices will head up again this week. A West-Midcontinent trader whosaid she saw “down-up-down-up” price movement expects the SouthernCalifornia border to recover to “$2.70ish” today after droppingabout a dime below that Friday.

There was considerable disparity between Tennessee’s Zone 0(Texas) and Zone 1 (Louisiana) pools. Zone 0 was under restrictiondue to a 100 Line leak in Louisiana and fell about 15 cents, whilethe 500 and 800 Lines in Zone 1 barely dropped at all.

A considerable amount of deepwater Gulf of Mexico gas wasexpected to return over the weekend. Equilon Pipeline (a jointventure of Texaco and Shell) said it had gotten approval fromMinerals Management Service to restart the crude oil PoseidonPipeline it operates west of the Ship Shoal 332 platform. Thatwould allow about 87,000 b/d of crude from seven platforms to bererouted from the west section of Poseidon into the Amberjack line,Equilon said. An unknown amount of associated gas productionpresumably would return along with the crude flows.

A Rockies producer said quite a few bids were coming in late,”and I wished we had had more gas to sell them because the priceswere higher then.” In a similar vein, another trader said theSouthern California border “really perked up when bids dropped downnear index. It seems that everyone who had been a seller suddenlybecame a buyer.”

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