The downhill price path got steeper for nearly all points Wednesday except for a few in the West. Traders continued to dwell on the relative brevity of a heat wave this week in northern market areas and their expectations of another 100 Bcf-plus storage refill in Thursday morning’s report by the Energy Information Administration.

Some declines were as small as about a nickel, but the vast majority were in double digits and ranged as high as about 40 cents. San Juan Basin and the PG&E citygate recorded upticks of up to 15 cents, while some other western points were essentially flat.

Once again a natural gas screen that spent much of the morning in the vicinity of unchanged, before eventually recording a daily gain of 6 cents, offered little guidance to cash traders. The small Nymex advance is unlikely to rally the cash market in the face of weather fundamentals that will continue to weaken as the weekend approaches, said one source, although she noted that the crude oil and heating oil futures contracts for August spiked after both EIA and the American Petroleum Institute reported significant reductions in U.S. stockpiles. Crude rose more than a dollar to settle just a nickel shy of $30/bbl.

Although highs of 90 degrees or more continued to dominate the weather picture Wednesday in most of the East and the southern reaches of the West, an eastward-moving cold front was due to cool off parts of the Midwest as early as Thursday. And traders already were familiar with forecasts indicating that this week’s heat in the Midwest and Northeast, which drove Monday’s bullishness, would be only a memory when the weekend rolls around.

Hot temperatures in inland California and east-of-California markets, along with some transport constraints on El Paso, helped keep California/San Juan points and a couple in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest relatively firm, a western trader said. However, Permian Basin/Waha numbers were subject to declining intrastate Texas load, she added. North Texas was predicted to be cooling off a bit Thursday, and the drop in utility load was obvious as it was “not as easy to find market today [Wednesday] as usual,” she said.

Traders in markets as disparate as Michigan and Florida noted that oil seems to be handily winning the price war against gas at present. “A lot of our Michigan customers are on oil now,” said a marketer. He said he could get them fuel oil at a burnertip cost of around $6/MMBtu, but gas would be priced about half a dollar higher. He added that his Michigan volumes will be very weak for July; besides all the fuel switching, the auto manufacturers shut down their plants in the first two weeks of July for annual model turnaround work.

A trader in the Florida market said his activity has been pretty slack lately. Persistent rain has tended to keep cooling load in the state subdued for several weeks, of course, but he also has seen quite a few Florida customers switching over to fuel oil in the last couple of months. He estimated a burnertip premium of at least $2 for gas in comparison to oil.

Bidweek business remained a fairly slow developer Wednesday, but a marketer reported fixed-price deals in the mid $5.30s for Waha, mid $5.00s for Transwestern Permian and mid $5.20s for El Paso Permian.

A Gulf Coast producer sees Thursday as “a big day” for bidweek, since the latest storage report and the July futures expiration will happen within a few hours of each other. “There could be lots of chances to make money,” he said.

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