While gas traders, especially those who deal with western points, pondered the ramifications of the PG&E bankruptcy filing (see related story), most of the cash market saw moderate firmness Friday. A large majority of the upticks were in the vicinity of a dime, although scattered points rose as much as about 15 cents and others were up only about a nickel. There were small declines in the Rockies and substantially larger ones in California.

Generally, sources were at a loss to explain how prices could rise in the face of almost no weather-related load anywhere and the typical demand slump of a weekend period to boot. “I came close to finding no buyers at all,” said a Gulf Coast marketer. He and others could only surmise that cash got a psychological boost from Thursday’s gradual screen run-up of just under a quarter, and that some people may have been buying to get an early jump on the storage injection season.

“It was pretty much a dead market day for us,” said a Texas trader. “People are running out of here [at mid-afternoon] just as fast as they can go.” The state still wasn’t hot enough for significant air conditioning load, he said, and even though the Comanche Peak 1 nuclear unit in North Texas was at zero output for a refueling outage, the South Texas 2 nuke was ramping back up from an outage and was expected to return to full power over the weekend. Waha prices were weak in comparison with both rest-of-month and May numbers, the trader noted.

A good indicator of the weakness in fundamental demand was an OFO Balancing Alert declared for Saturday by Tennessee to guard against excessive linepack (see Transportation Notes). Transwestern and the Duke Energy tandem of Texas Eastern and Algonquin were among other pipes posting shipper advisories about high linepack last week.

A Rockies marketer said Questar had assured her that 100% of Clay Basin storage injection nominations would be honored for the weekend.

Although California prices were finally retreating a bit from their spikes earlier in the week, Friday’s quotes left them all about $2.50-3.00 above first-of-month indexes.

“Too soon to tell” was the most popular opinion about whether PG&E’s bankruptcy would have much if any impact on the gas market. “Somebody has got to serve the [utility’s] customers, so I don’t see any significant changes,” according to one trader. Another pointed out that PG&E’s biggest problems were on the power side, and that a gas supply problem was probably unlikely because it is able to pass on increased gas costs to its customers.

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