Cash prices built further Tuesday on their early-week gains invirtually every market except Northern California. Factors behindthe firmness remained much the same as on Monday: a moderate screenincrease, a “stash it while you can” storage mentality and agradual warming trend in northern market areas. Price movementranged from flat on several Rockies pipes to about a nickel higherat many Gulf Coast and Midcontinent points.

“It’s getting hot again,” observed a Midcontinent marketerreporting heavy power generation load on the Williams system.

A Gulf Coast source was in agreement, adding that recent nuclearplant outages in Louisiana and Texas have been worth almost 800MMcf/d in regional gas load. Quite a few utilities are behind ontheir storage injection schedules and are using the relative lullfrom last month’s intense heat waves in an attempt to catch up, hesaid. For that reason, besides keeping demand for swing gas high,the utilities are keeping their takes of indexed baseload gas atmaximum levels, he added.

Heavy air conditioning load in Texas had Waha trading just 2-3cents below Katy, while Houston Ship Channel deliveries commanded apremium of almost a nickel above Henry Hub. Most Waha gas was goingto either the Midcontinent or North Texas area because thetransport economics to Katy didn’t work, a marketer said.

One Southeast trader sees little chance for prices to get muchhigher than they are now. “As far as real demand goes, there is nodoubt in my mind that last week turned out better than this weekwill,” he said. “There aren’t as many end-users buying gas as therewere a week ago. I’d say the ratio is 3:1 sellers to buyers.”

Malin and the PG&E citygate were Tuesday’s rare weakerpoints. There’s just not as much cooling load in NorthernCalifornia as there is to the south, said a marketer who pointedout that his purchases into the PG&E system at the SouthernCalifornia border had widened to nearly a dime under SoCalGasdeliveries.

Intra-Alberta quotes barely managed to creep any higher due to alightning strike at PG&E Gas Transmission-Northwest’s Station13 (see Transportation Notes) preventing any Kingsgate volumeincreases, which caused gas to back up at the A/BC (Alberta/BritishColumbia) border, said a Calgary source. However, the situation wasstarting to ease Tuesday afternoon, he said.

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