Thursday’s prices were pretty soft with across the board declines ranging from a nickel to about 35 cents. But traders had no doubt that much bigger bears would rear up in the cash market Friday.

For the second report in a row, a weekly volume record was set when the Energy Information Administration said 125 Bcf was injected into storage last week. There was no argument whatsoever about the negative market impact as the screen started plunging immediately and wound up the day with a loss of 60.7 cents. If ever there was a clear signal for cash to “follow the screen,” this was it, sources said.

A Florida utility buyer agreed there was “not much mystery” about where weekend prices will be headed. The storage report and subsequent screen plunge are the obvious factors, of course, but there’s also the usual lower weekend demand and little change in weather influences, she said. Noting that Florida Gas Transmission was cautioning customers again about another “potential” Overage Alert Day notice, the buyer commented that she doesn’t mind when the pipeline doesn’t follow through on such warnings, as has happened several times in recent weeks. “It beats the heck out of having to comply” with an actual notice.

Futures prices had been pretty static for about a month, so it was kind of startling to see such a huge downturn in one day, said a Midwest utility buyer. But it was “good news for us” that cash appears certain to stage its own crash-dive Friday “since we’re net buyers nearly all of the time,” she added. The buyer said she was not sure if all the recent “demand destruction” talk associated with high gas prices has been good. Sure, it may help avert a potential supply crisis this winter, she acknowledged, but it would be better “if the industry is able to win back some lost load with prices getting much lower.” Midwest weather is staying mild, she said.

A Rockies marketer reported seeing evidence of weekend softness on an online trading platform. Opal was being bid at $4.40 and offered at $4.54, while the border-SoCalGas spread was $4.90-5.25, he said. However, he called the $4.90 border bid “rather indeterminate” since the volume was less than 3 MMcf/d. Turning to Thursday’s prices, the marketer noted that Rockies points saw some of the larger drops of 30 cents or more because the West had lost a significant amount of air conditioning load since earlier in the week. Sumas really fell hard, he said, due to Westcoast’s Pine River Gas Plant adding about 45 MMcf/d into the market following the end of recent maintenance.

The marketer went on to observe that such a big storage injection may have surprised a lot of people, “but it [injection] could be even bigger in next week’s report. This week’s mild weather is certainly conducive to an increase.” Obviously the utilities talking about how hard they’ve been pushing injections over the last month haven’t been lying, he said, since the last few EIA reports bear them out. However, he saw a chance for gas prices turning around next Monday, at least in the West, because he heard that western power prices at Palo Verde were getting bid up for that period.

What might have become Tropical Storm Bill instead was being downgraded into a tropical wave Thursday by the National Hurricane Center. The center of Tropical Depression Two was dissipating as it moved westward more than 800 miles east-southeast of the Windward Islands, NHC said. It will issued no more public advisories on the system unless regeneration occurs.

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