Moderate increases were the hallmark of most of the cash market Tuesday as cold fronts approaching the key Northeast and Midwest market areas threatened to have a fair amount of heating load in place by Thursday. Otherwise the bearish influences of moderate weather in much of the rest of the U.S., prior-day screen softness, bulging storage inventories and no Atlantic storm threats to offshore production remained in play.

Declines of up to nearly a quarter were concentrated in the West, although Western Canada and some Rockies/Pacific Northwest quotes saw small gains on either side of a nickel as lows in the 30s were being recorded in the Calgary area and parts of the Rockies were due to see lows in the 40s.

With a few flat points in the mix, most of the market was up anywhere from 2-3 cents to nearly a quarter.

It is illustrative of how weak the September aftermarket has been to note that only Questar is currently trading less than a dollar below its first-of-month index, and more than half of all points are ringing up $2-plus deficits to index.

Natural gas futures finally kicked in a little support for Wednesday’s cash prices by breaking a string of down days with an increase of just over a nickel Tuesday. And cash numbers will likely be able to muster more upticks Wednesday because lows in the 40s are expected to blanket most of the East Thursday as far south as the Upper South.

But that may be it for a firming market, cautions the Weather 2000 consulting firm, which predicted that temperatures as high as the 80s will be returning over the weekend as far north as the Dakotas.

It seemed counterintuitive, but after the PG&E citygate posted a 19-cent gain Monday despite facing a high-inventory OFO on Tuesday, it was down about a dime Tuesday although the utility ended the OFO.

A Gulf Coast producer said he believed that Tuesday’s moderate increases in the daily market were chiefly due to prices having gotten so low over the past week that it was time for a reversal of direction. However, he did acknowledge that the cold fronts moving into northern market areas could be capable of generating a fair amount of heating load for gas.

It’s been a “very slow” bidweek so far for the producer, who said he was finding it difficult to find baseload buyers. But the buyers may regret thinking that index and basis would weaken, he added, because both actually got a little stronger Tuesday. As an example, he reported making some Transco Station 65 sales at basis of plus 3 cents, which compared to flat basis Monday, he said. However, he thought most of Tuesday’s Station 65 basis deals were done at plus 2 cents.

Ron Denhardt of Winchester, MA-based Strategic Energy & Economic Research expects a storage build of 86 Bcf to be reported for the week ending Sept. 22.

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