The cash swing market kind of “muddled around” Tuesday,unimpressed by a small screen uptick or anything else for thatmatter, according to a Midcontinent trader. Nearly all points wereflat to barely a penny or two lower. The big drop of a nickel or soat Sumas likely was due to a three-day outage of Jackson Prairiestorage operations starting today, causing Northwest to get strictabout banking gas on the system, one source said.

Except for supply constraints in San Juan Basin, fundamentalsremain a no-show in the market, a Southwest marketer said. The bulkof El Paso’s Blanco Plant maintenance outage ended last Thursday,he said, but some continues to restrict gas this week. And theunplanned outage of Transwestern’s Bisti Station is making aboutanother 150 MMcf/d unavailable, the marketer estimated.

Canadian traders returned from holiday Tuesday to find swingintra-Alberta prices running in the C$2.70 area, about C3 centsabove where they left the market Friday. One Calgary source wastrading intra-Alberta baseload for June at C$2.67-68 but said sheexpects many deals for provincial gas to be done swing since May31-June 9 inspections of NOVA receipt points will take an estimated1 Bcf/d off the market for the first week of June.

Fixed-price quotes for June remained scarce Tuesday, but sourcesdid report deals at $1.94-96 for San Juan-Blanco, $2.17-19 for theSouthern California border and $2.04 for Malin. Those numbers, only4-8 cents below May indexes, belied projections late last week thatgoing by basis talk, June indexes would be falling by a dime ormore. However, whether bidweek trading will move from up or downfrom these early quotes “will depend entirely on where the screengoes,” a marketer commented.

The Midcontinent is looking pretty soft for June with lots ofsupply being offered, a buyer said. All the June deals he did orwas hearing of were at index or below. NGPL-Midcontinent has tradedat index minus 0.75, Panhandle Eastern at index minus 0.5,ANR-Southwest at index flat to minus 0.25, and NorthernNatural-demarc and Ventura at index flat, he said. But Chicagocitygates are commanding a small premium to index, the buyer added.

For no reason that he could detect, a marketer saw threesuccessive Chicago basis purchases Tuesday rise steadily from plus4.75 to plus 5 to plus 5.25. Another source quoted basis deals atplus 21 for Texas Eastern M-3, plus 15.25 for CNG South Point,minus 5 for Texas Eastern-East Louisiana and minus 6.25 forTennessee 800 Leg.

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