It wasn’t much, but prices could claim a bit more weather support than they had last week in recording upticks Monday ranging from only a penny or two to about 15 cents. Gains were fairly evenly spread across geographic markets.

Air conditioning load is starting to build slightly across the southern tier of states and even extending through the Midcontinent into the Upper Plains and the eastern and southern portions of the Midwest. Triple-digit high temperatures continue to persist in the desert Southwest.

“It should be warm enough for us to have a few gas-fired peakers working” through at least midweek, said a Lower Midwest utility buyer. On a more bearish note, she said her company is expecting “another high storage injection number” this week.

On the flip side, a strong Canadian high-pressure system was causing frost advisories to be posted for Tuesday in northeastern New York and upper New England, according to The Weather Channel. A New England utility buyer said the forecast indicated potential nighttime lows in the 40s this week, so there was a good chance of some furnaces being fired up.

The Pacific Northwest is also chilly enough that some heating load could be showing up.

The Atlantic tropical scene may have added an extra note of medium-term bullishness to the cash market. As an East Coast utility buyer noted, “Wow! The hurricane season sure has heated up in a hurry.” That observation was confirmed by the National Hurricane Center having advisories about four systems, including two full-fledged hurricanes, posted on its web site (https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index.shtml) Monday afternoon.

Hurricane Isabel was gaining strength and had potential to become a Category 4 storm Monday night, NHC said. At 5 p.m. AST its center was still about 1,195 miles east of the northern Leeward Islands and moving toward the west-northwest at nearly 14 mph. Isabel had maximum sustained winds of almost 125 mph. Tropical Depression 14 was trailing Isabel in the far eastern Atlantic, moving slowly at less than 6 mph about 200 miles south-southeast of the southernmost Cape Verde Islands.

As for the two has-beens: Tropical Depression Henri, downgraded from a tropical storm after giving central Florida a heavy drenching over the weekend, was losing its tropical characteristics as it drifted slowly northeastward about 160 miles south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, NC. Fabian was still a hurricane Monday afternoon but becoming extratropical over the cold North Atlantic, so its strength had faded to barely above the hurricane threshold (winds of 74 mph or greater). It was chugging right along to the northeast at nearly 39 mph about 680 miles east-northeast of Cape Race, NF. NHC said it would issue no further advisories for either Henri or Fabian.

Because of the tremendous distance that Isabel still has to cover before reaching the eastern Caribbean, any assessment of risk to offshore production won’t be practical until around the end of the week. However, the Weather 2000 consulting firm was forecasting a 40% chance of Gulf of Mexico entry and a 60% chance of a Florida-and-eastward track.

A couple of cash traders were puzzled about the screen being about a dime higher during morning trading, only to wind up 11 cents down that afternoon. “I heard it was just technical action by the Nymex locals that caused the change,” said one souce, adding that he was unaware of any news events or other factors driving futures.

Analyst Kyle Cooper of Citigroup said his final estimation for this week’s storage report looks for an injection of 95-105 Bcf. “A build of 85 Bcf would exceed the five-year average by 25% and continue to place inventories on track to reach the 3,000-3,050 Bcf range” by the end of injection season, he said.

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