Although it was getting chillier Friday in major northern marketareas, traders agreed the weather wasn’t severe enough to justifyfurther strong jumps in cash prices. Rather, they said, it wascontinued muscle-flexing by the screen along with a fresh spurt ofbuying for storage that produced price gains ranging from about adime to a quarter at all but a few points.

Cash is still very weak relative to futures, a couple of traderstold Daily GPI (Henry Hub in the low to mid $4.60s Friday was about30 cents below the screen closing). Because of that, “it makessense to inject as much storage as possible before cash is able toplay catch-up,” said a marketer in the Midcontinent/Midwest market.”We’re dumping a boatload into storage for the weekend.”

Predictions of cold weather going into the weekend for theMidwest and Northeast were somewhat exaggerated, but lowtemperatures around freezing are projected for early this week.There’s no doubt many traders looked ahead to that kind of demand,one trader said.

Transwestern-West Texas was a rare point able to advance only insingle digits, rising only about a nickel. The backup of gas causedby Transwestern’s closing a San Juan Basin section due to a trainderailment near the mainline didn’t appear to be hurting pricesmuch earlier in the week, a marketer said, but they must have beensomewhat repressed when the pipeline extended a force majeure andcapacity constraint through at least Saturday (see TransportationNotes).

Intra-Alberta numbers participated in the overall bull marketdespite a continuing maintenance bottleneck at the ABC(Alberta/British Columbia) border. Once again a rising futurescontract helped counteract the capacity constraint, a Calgarytrader said. The Sumas-domestic price spread on Northwest didn’twiden any further as both points registered similar upticks. ButSumas, although spiking sharply toward the end of Friday trading,is primed for a big downturn today because the ABC constraintshould be over by then, the trader said.

A key supporting element of the current cash firmness is that asequence of cold-weather patterns is starting to build, said aHouston-based marketer. After the one due early this week, anotherone looks likely in the 11- to 15-day forecasts, he added. The bigquestion about cold snaps supporting gas prices is theirdurability, the marketer said; they need to hang around four to sixdays each time to keep the bull market going, but often last threedays or less.

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