The national heat wave continued through Friday into theweekend, and electric utilities continued to use appeals forcustomer conservation and other demand-side management tools tokeep juice flowing as needed. But the heavy cooling load lost itsability to keep cash gas prices moving higher. Instead, most pointswere about a dime or more down in flows for the last day of July,and although quotes for Sunday and Monday tended to surpass thosefor Saturday, they still were below monthly indexes. Sources citedthe usual drop in weekend demand, a small screen decrease andforecasts that major market areas will have cooled off a bit bytoday as reasons for the softness.

The aftermarket saw another schizophrenic beginning since theweekend bridged the monthly divide, and there was no consensuswhatever on price direction. Some sources reported distinctivedifferences between Saturday-only and Sunday-Monday numbers, whileothers said there was no significant movement between the twoperiods. And just to twist matters further, most Calgary traderswere doing their deals through Tuesday because of today beingCanada’s Civic Holiday.

One aggregator found its weekend quotes ranging from flat atNortheast citygates between the Saturday and Sunday-Monday periods,while Gulf Coast numbers averaged 3-10 cents higher forSunday-Monday than on Saturday. But marketers in both theMidcontinent and Southwest said there was little if any appreciabledifference in their prices over the entire weekend, and a couple ofsources said Saturday deals commanded at least a small premium dueto the approaching break in the heat.

Divided opinion also surfaced in market expectations for thefirst week of August. A marketer expects prices to remainrelatively weaker due to power loads being “way off.” But whileanother trader conceded that the heat wave will be considerablymilder this week, he added, “At least ‘this one’ [heat wave] will,”meaning that it will be August and another siege of intense hotweather is bound to be just around the corner.

The first two months of 1999’s hurricane season have ended withno Atlantic storm activity of any significance to gas production.Such a lack of early storms is normal, one forecasting servicesaid. Last year the quiet period lasted until September, when theseason made up for lost time with approximately a hurricane a week.

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