Prices registered across-the-board upticks that generally ranged from about a nickel to 15 cents Wednesday as cash traders had quite a lot on their plates to digest: the sudden resignation late Tuesday of Jeffrey Skilling as Enron’s president and CEO; the subsequent pounding Wednesday taken by stock prices for Enron and other large energy companies; the formation of Tropical Depression Four in the Atlantic; and the moderate futures strength generated during the morning by news of the tropical activity.

And all that came before the afternoon yielded a couple of more big surprises: first, the stunningly small volume of 3 Bcf that AGA said was injected into storage last week (with the Consuming Region East recording a net withdrawal of 12 Bcf and the Producing Region seeing zero change); and second, an equally stunning futures spike that left the day’s eventual advance just a little shy of 40 cents.

“Your headline should be `Market not buying the storage number,'” a Texas-based marketer told NGI. He and a few other sources expressed skepticism about the validity of AGA’s report, even though it appeared to lend verification to reports of significant withdrawals from storage last week while the eastern U.S. and Canada were battling a torturous heat wave and coping with the weekend loss of offshore production due to Tropical Storm Barry.

“I think the AGA must have received some bogus data, especially in the East,” the Texas marketer said. He thinks we’ll continue to see cash trading higher today “but obviously at a much bigger discount to the screen.”

Others weren’t so sure about cash firmness being sustainable today. A Midcontinent/Midwest trader came flat out with his viewpoint, saying, “I don’t believe this [3 Bcf] injection number. Actually I didn’t believe the last two because they seemed too high, and see this more as a `correction’ downward.” He didn’t doubt there was lots of hot weather demand last week, “but I don’t see how injections possibly could have been that low.” Under the circumstances, he looks for cash to soften at least moderately along with the Nymex today, saying, “There’s just too little weather demand right now for the screen spike to bring cash any higher.” He added that he had expected a lot of people would be out trying to sell gas Wednesday and was surprised at the paucity of supply offers.

A Calgary source, reporting intra-Alberta prices rising sharply into the C$4.10s Wednesday afternoon in response to the futures runup, also was in the camp doubting the AGA volume. “A 3 Bcf report was unbelievable,” he said. “I don’t think the entire industry could have been 50 Bcf off [in prior expectations].”

A Northeast trader offered this reason for anticipating new softness: “You have all these LDCs ready to start dumping gas now that prices are getting near index again because they just don’t have the weather demand around any more.” He doesn’t see the futures runup as enough to avert low prices in the face of weak fundamentals. He also dismissed the tropical depression for now, saying “The storm effect [on the market] won’t really kick in until early next week, if then, so I don’t see it being anything but a psychological factor at this time.”

Tropical Depression Four was about 825 miles east of the Windward Islands (the southern half of the Lesser Antilles chain between Puerto Rico and Venezuela), the National Weather Service said in a 5 p.m. EDT update Wednesday. It was moving rapidly westward at nearly 23 mph and is a good candidate for achieving the name Chantal.

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