Except for small upticks in San Juan Basin and related pointspartially due to an unexpected compressor station outage (seeTransportation Notes), the cash market again was mildly softerMonday. Much like last week, a screen decline of about a nickelprovided about the only influence meaningful to cash traders. Evensome cool weather returning to the Midwest failed to keep Chicagoand Michigan citygates from dropping 2-3 cents, while Midcontinentfield numbers were mostly flat.

Transwestern clapped a ceiling of about 700 MMcf/d on San JuanLateral capacity through Thursday after lightning knocked out itsBisti Station Monday. That had a few people scrambling for intraday”renom” gas, a marketer said, but apparently the situation wasn’ttoo bad. He was notified that he would lose some supplies at theCalifornia border but was somewhat relieved when word came that thecut would be only about 1.6 MMcf/d. A couple of other Southwesttraders said they were unaffected by the Transwestern outage.

The market was quite quiet north of the border as nearly allCanadian traders observed Victoria Day.

Swing cash was weaker along with the screen Monday morning, aHouston source said, but that didn’t matter much to people who werealready starting to put their May positions to bed and prepare forJune business. But typical of most bidweeks, “tire kicking” withlittle concrete action was a common description for this one’sbeginning.

Basis appeared to be a little tighter than before Monday,probably because of the further weakness of the June Henry Hubfutures contract, a Midcontinent marketer said. Index-premium dealswere being driven lower, he added. Panhandle Eastern andNGPL-Midcontinent packages traded at index-minus premiums andtrading ANR-Southwest at index-flat.

A Southwest source reported hearing basis of minus 12-14(ask-bid spread) for El Paso-Permian, minus 22-24 for SanJuan-Blanco and flat for the Southern California border. Anothertrader quoting minus 13-14 basis for Permian Basin said he expectsactivity to pick up considerably Wednesday and Thursday and thatthis will be a relatively heavy bidweek for fixed prices.

Florida Gas Transmission-Zone 1 may be a tough sale for a while,a marketer observed because the pipeline extended a maintenanceconstraint at Johnson’s Bayou in southwestern Louisiana beyond itsoriginal scheduled completion of May 17 and has yet to set a newend-date. That has some people reluctant to commit any Junebaseload there at this point, the marketer said.

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