Feeding on the midweek renewal or continuance of cold weather in several market areas, prices kept rising Wednesday at nearly all points. A few Northeast citygates that were flat to a little over 15 cents lower were the only deviations from overall upticks ranging from about a nickel to 45 cents.

The current rally may be on its last legs, however. After another day of winter storm nastiness in the Midwest and Northeast, warming trends are expected to develop going into the weekend. Parts of the South will finally be feeling a touch of chill Thursday, but only at the western end will highs get as low as the 30s. Some western points may be most resistant to softening since freezing lows are likely to persist a while longer in the Rockies, Pacific Northwest and Western Canada.

Another bearish sign for cash numbers was the loss of screen support. Natural gas futures followed up on Tuesday’s dime-plus gain with a loss just shy of 7 cents Wednesday. The rest of Nymex’s energy futures complex also was moderately weaker after Wednesday morning reports showed a sharp drop in crude oil inventories, but sizeable increases in the stockpiles of distillates (including heating oil) and gasoline

One source suggested that traders may have been “correcting” huge basis spreads from the Gulf Coast that developed Tuesday in which some citygates opened dollar-plus gaps over Henry Hub.

Here are a couple of examples of how heavy western heating load had gotten: Northern Natural Gas, whose normal system-weighted temperature at this time of year is 15 degrees, projected averages of five and eight degrees respectively for Wednesday and Thursday before a warm-up takes them to 18 degrees Friday and 24 degrees Saturday. NNG extended a System Overrun Limitation day notice for its Zone A/B/C through at least Thursday. And Westar Energy reported more than 90,000 customers without power in its Kansas service area Wednesday after a major ice storm.

A producer who said temperatures were barely above freezing Wednesday afternoon in Calgary, added that the power generation market in the Pacific Northwest was especially strong due to cold weather raising electricity prices. Demand was so strong, he said, that one generator told him he was even firing up his highly inefficient 11 heat rate gas-fired plant. Most of the competitive electricity sources in the area have heat rates around seven, the producer said.

He noted that Stanfield was trading a near-parity with Malin in the mid $5.60s when Malin is normally more than a nickel higher. Even odder, he said, is that Sumas was priced considerably higher than the other two points, which is “highly unusual.” One reason for the Sumas strength is that Westcoast is running about 300 MMcf below its linepack target and is encouraging packing of the system with its imbalance tolerance settings.

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