On a day in which most of the market moved moderately higher as cold weather began to spread its reach into the South and parts of the West, Northeast citygates recorded triple-digit plunges Thursday after two previous days of spiking as high as $25.50. Non-Northeast price movement was generally small in ranging from a couple of pennies down to about 15 cents higher, but a few scattered points saw gains from about 20 cents to a little over half a dollar.

The Northeast was due to remain frigid Friday for the most part with sub-zero thermometer levels near the Canadian border, and some of its cold was spilling over into the eastern states of the South, where ice storms were in the forecast.

Winter storm alerts were posted for 22 states on The Weather Channel’s web site, with most of the activity concentrated in the Southeast, Midcontinent and upper West, with a few states from the Northeast and Midwest included.

Earlier concern about a storage report coinciding with a screen expiry again, evoking painful memories of the Thanksgiving week fiasco, proved unfounded. The Energy Information Administration reported a storage withdrawal of 230 Bcf for the week ending Jan. 21, with the East region — not surprisingly — accounting for nearly two-thirds of the pull. The volume was close to the high end of prior expectations. Nymex traders treated the report as slightly bullish at first, but later sent the February contract off the board with a dime loss to $6.288.

A Northeast utility buyer said Thursday wasn’t quite as cold as his company had expected, and while the region in general could expect some moderation in temperatures around Saturday, his area was due for a bit of warmup as early as Friday afternoon. His city was predicted to see a low-high range Thursday of 6-13 degrees, while the Friday forecast was for 15-23 degrees and “even warmer Saturday,” he said. Another factor in plummeting Northeast citygates, the buyer said, was that “folks aren’t going to want to pay for $25 gas any longer than they have to” (Transco Zone 6-New York City still recorded a peak of $23.25 Thursday, but it was the only point exceeding $17).

It was a “pretty slow day” for a Calgary-based producer. Intra-Alberta numbers saw one of the smallest gains of about 3 cents with the weather being relatively “warm” in Calgary for late January and due to stay that way for a while, he said. He looks for lower swing prices Friday due to Thursday’s Nymex loss, moderating weather trends in some areas and the usual weekend drop in industrial load.

The producer perceived most of bidweek business as having been completed Thursday. He noted that the storage report tended to push the screen up at first, “and we thought, ‘Great! We can sell more February gas. But then futures started falling,” squelching that notion, he said. There was so much Chicago volume done the first day of bidweek (Tuesday) that the citygate index was pretty well set then, he added. He expects the Chicago index to be around the mid $6.30s, “pretty close to where Nymex was.” Chicago started trading at the NGI index flat at first, the producer reported, but by Thursday he was seeing index deals as soft as minus 8 cents.

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