The cash market remained bullish Tuesday despite flaggingsupport from energy futures. That was being replaced by moderateheating load starting to surface in northern market areas alongwith strong power generation demand and storage concerns in theWest.

Price increases ranged from around a nickel to about 20 cents inTransco’s Zone 6-NYC pool. The biggest development one Houstonmarketer saw was cooler autumn-like weather moving into theNortheast, causing citygates there to record Tuesday’s biggestadvances.

Another key price factor was unplanned outages occurring overthe weekend at several major nuclear plants, the marketer said.That had utilities coming out to buy gas Monday and Tuesday forreplacement power generation. He listed the Rockport plant in Ohioas the biggest outage, with those at the Calvert Cliffs andLimerick facilities (both PJM Interconnection) and Crystal Riverplant (Florida) as also significant.

Overall there’s a lot of nuclear power down right now, themarketer continued, but that’s nothing like what’s coming up with anumber of planned maintenance and/or refueling outages scheduledover the next month or so. “There will be about as many nukes downat one time as I can ever remember,” he said. It didn’t used tomatter so much that nuclear facilities often planned their downtimefor autumn because of generally mild weather and plentiful gassupplies, but that’s not the case now, he said. “It’s still prettyhot in the Southwest and gas is short.”

Another Texas trader was in agreement, saying he was buying”tons of gas” to send west from Waha because of heat in Californiaand the desert Southwest. Utility and storage demand also werepretty decent within Texas, which he attributed largely to highDecember and January pricing on the Nymex screen.

A Calgary source is looking for Southern California borderprices to stay very strong through next month. “They’ve beenhauling out of storage to beat the band for a long time due to hotweather and the El Paso break, and now there’s not much time leftto put that gas back into storage,” she said.

By the way, it’s Hurricane Florence now, but she is no threat toland anytime soon, the National Weather Service said. As of lateyesterday afternoon, Florence was 330 miles south-southeast of CapeHatteras National Seashore, NC, and moving slowly and erraticallytoward the northwest.

In addition, there were low-pressure areas in the westernCaribbean Sea and western Gulf of Mexico that are encounteringconditions favorable for development, NWS said.

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