While the trading community continued to stew over what virtually everyone agreed was an outlandishly low AGA storage injection figure, it sent cash prices diving Friday. Declines tended to be between about 15 and 35 cents, with those in the 20s most common. Many points were giving up nearly all the price territory they had gained the day before.

Sources largely attributed the softness to little change in weak weather fundamentals, a continuation of the late selloff on Thursday and the usual slump in demand over a weekend. A static screen during the morning provided essentially no input to the cash market.

After being downgraded to a tropical wave Thursday night, Chantal restrengthened into a tropical depression Friday after reaching the eastern Caribbean Sea and then achieved tropical storm status again, the National Weather Service said in its late afternoon update. At that point the storm was about 325 miles south-southeast of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and moving westward at nearly 23 mph. The government of Jamaica declared a hurricane watch. Chantal “could become a hurricane in the western Caribbean,” NWS said.

One trader observed that Friday’s price drops left many points such as Chicago, trading in the vicinity of first-of-month indexes. It was a fairly slow trading day to close out what had certainly been an eventful news week for the industry, he said.

A marketer reported getting Niagara offers in the mid $3.30s, but declined to take any, saying that was too close to Transco Zone 6-NYC and Texas Eastern M-3 in the $3.50 area for him to make transportation work.

A western buyer said Sumas and Westcoast Station 2 began the morning near their lows (low $2.70s and high C$3.80s respectively) and moved higher in an attempt at some convergence with intra-Alberta numbers in the C$4.10s.

“We’ve talked to too many different big players in the East to be able to accept AGA’s storage figure,” said an Oklahoma-based trader. Their reports just don’t jibe with such a low injection volume, he said. No one entity is a big enough storage player to be able to skew the AGA report by themselves with bad data, so it remains a big mystery on what went wrong, he concluded.

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