Prices continued to fall at all points Friday as weather-based load remained meager, prior-day screen guidance was negative and concerns about near-term storage injection availability mounted. Only the PG&E citygate decline, which was affected by interior Northern California temperatures still forecast to approach 100 during the weekend, was by less than double digits.

Losses ranged from a little more than a nickel to about 40 cents, and other than the hot California market tending to see the smallest dips, were fairly evenly distributed among geographic areas.

Monday’s cash market for the first of September will again lack screen support as the October futures contract made its prompt-month debut Friday with a drop of 17.3 cents (see related story).

Tropical Storm Danny appeared increasingly likely to eliminate any cooling demand from the Mid-Atlantic through Canada’s Maritimes provinces over the next few days. But although its projected route carried Danny close to the U.S. East Coast, it should be remembered that the worst effects from a tropical storm or hurricane occur on the north and east sides.

A “broad area of low pressure” about 900 miles west-southwest of the southernmost Cape Verde Islands Friday morning continued to produce disorganized showers and thunderstorms, the National Hurricane Center said, and it gave the system a “medium chance” (30-50%) of becoming a tropical cyclone within the next 48 hours.

It was pretty much a case of “same old, same old” in the overall weather picture for the weekend: moderate to cool from the Northeast through the Midwest into the Midcontinent, Upper Plains, Rockies/Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. The South east of Texas could expect peak temperatures only around 90 or so, allowing Florida Gas Transmission to lift an Overage Alert Day Friday.

Southern California coastal highs starting to reach the mid 80s added a minimal amount of cooling load to Golden State gas demand.

In its six- to 10-day forecast update posted Thursday afternoon, the National Weather Service looked for below-normal temperatures in the East to have receded during the Sept. 6-10 period to most of the Southeast through the western Midcontinent. It expected above-normal readings to have retreated from the West Coast but to remain in effect from eastern California through eastern Washington state through northern Michigan in the north to southwestern New Mexico in the south.

Kern River, which had been reporting normal linepack earlier in the week, said volumes had risen to high in the three farthest downstream of its four system segments Friday.

Without something like a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico, a Northeast utility buyer said he couldn’t see any major rebounds in gas prices during September. “We’re cool in the Northeast,” he said, and it looks like that condition will stick around for a while. Regarding whether an unusually cool summer will be followed by an extra-cold winter, the buyer said the forecasts for the coming winter differ; “the main fact is we’re not there yet.” A cold winter would help empty high storage volumes, he said, “but you don’t want extremes.”

His utility bought very little baseload gas for September, he said.

A western trader said he was about to go into a meeting, so his “two-minute synopsis” was: storage is full for all practical purposes; Canada prices are at their lowest since May of last year (“we’re talking Wal-Mart pricing”), and he detected a massive sell-off Friday so people won’t get caught long entering September.

Granted, it was a small increase, but the Baker Hughes Rotary Rig Count (https://intelligencepress.com/features/bakerhughes/) of drilling rigs actively searching for natural gas in the U.S. was on the rise again during the week ending Aug. 28 with an increase of four rigs to 699. The gain represented yet another reversal to the general (and fairly steep) downturn in gas-seeking rigs during most of the first half of the year. The Gulf of Mexico and onshore plays added two rigs each, said Baker Hughes. Its latest tally was up 3% from a year ago but 56% less than the year-ago level.

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