To no one’s surprise, prices kept falling at most points Monday as weather-based demand remained weak and the previous Friday’s 17.3-cent drop by October futures in their prompt-month debut continued to put negative pressure on the cash market. However, the restoration of industrial load from its usual weekend decline, along with heat in some areas, allowed quite a few scattered points to be flat to nearly C25 cents higher.

Most of the renewed softness was on the light side, with most losses less than a dime in overall drops ranging from 2-3 cents to about 15 cents. The Rockies, California and (despite cool weather forecasts) Northeast citygates tended to be stronger than the general market.

The physical market will again toil under negative screen guidance Tuesday after October futures dropped another 5.6 cents Monday (see related story).

The weather outlook remains the same for the most part: hot in the desert Southwest and interior California, and not so much elsewhere. Even Texas is a little cooler than last week, with few highs expected to exceed the low to mid 90s Tuesday.

Tropical Storm Danny vanished over the weekend, but a new system of showers and thunderstorms associated with a broad area of low pressure about 500 miles east of the Lower Antilles had replaced it Monday, the National Hurricane Center said. However, this was expected to be another nonevent for the gas market; although the system was given a good chance of becoming a tropical depression within the next 48 hours, it was not expected to approach the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s getting pretty cool in the Northeast, a regional marketer said, but not enough for any significant heating load to develop yet. Regarding some reports that North America might see a colder-than-normal winter following a cooler-than-normal summer, he said that wasn’t the case in a similar situation two years ago, “so we’ll see.”

The marketer said there might have been a little under-the-radar trading of September baseload gas Monday, but he wasn’t seeing any.

“Really cheap gas” was a Southern utility buyer’s assessment of the market. He said his company didn’t buy any baseload for September, having sufficient supplies under term deals already. The utility’s storage account is about 96% full already, so it will just keep “managing” that account for a while, he said. The buyer said he had the impression that buyers were “not ignoring” the near-full storage situation any more.

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