The overall weather outlook remains mild to cool, but overnight lows in the 30s and 40s in parts of the Northeast, Rockies and Canada may have been enough to pull the cash market out of its recent slide Tuesday. Certainly the futures drop of 4.9 cents a day earlier didn’t contribute anything to the cause.

Upticks in the low single digits dominated trading in which a large majority of points were flat to nearly 15 cents higher. Most declines also were small at 2-3 cents to around a nickel. However, Tennessee Zone 4’s Line 300 continued to sink, falling nearly a quarter and posting a new low of $1.35 after bottoming out at $1.50 the day before.

The screen will have some positive guidance for cash trading Wednesday after breaking a string of recent weakness with a rebound of 2.1 cents (see related story).

With the remnants of former Hurricane Maria having faded from the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) monitoring map, Tropical Storm Philippe continued to churn westward Tuesday from 665 miles southeast of Bermuda. If continued long enough, such movement could take the storm into the eastern Gulf of Mexico, but NHC is still projecting a turn to the north in the next couple of days, followed eventually by a veer toward the northeast.

Other than the areas that are starting to cool enough to experience a moderate amount of heating demand, the rest of the market is still seeing pleasant early-fall weather. Even the normally hot Phoenix area is slipping to highs in the mid to upper 80s with a low forecast at slightly below 70.

Northern Natural Gas indicated that Upper Midwest conditions, while still on the chilly side, are unseasonably warm for this time of year. A bulletin board posting said Northern’s normal system-weighted temperature at this point is 54 degrees, but it projected averages of 67 Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by 66 Thursday and 70 Friday.

Other than the Jackson Prairie storage facility being shut in through Friday, some minor downstream constraints on Tennessee and shut-in production on Columbia Gas (see Transportation Notes), pipeline restrictions are fairly minimal for now.

A Texas marketer said his company was seeing power generation load rising a bit. It doesn’t seem to be warm enough for much air conditioning use, he added, but he speculated that with harvest season having arrived in the Midwest, there might have been some extra demand for both electricity and gas in crop-drying operations.

The marketer said he thinks prices will rise a little higher again Wednesday, especially with futures support being added to the mix of market influences.

Stephen Smith of Stephen Smith Energy Associates is projecting a storage build of 100 Bcf being reported for the week ending Sept. 30. Citi Futures Perspective analyst Tim Evans also looks for a 100 Bcf injection, to be followed by larger ones of 105 Bcf, 133 Bcf and 108 Bcf for the weeks ending Oct. 7, Oct. 14 and Oct. 21, respectively.

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