As anticipated, Monday’s near-quarter fall in natural gas futures was felt in Tuesday’s cash market, where declines ranged from as little as 3 cents to about 20 cents at most points but were as high as around half a dollar or more at a few Rockies/Pacific Northwest points. Many of the smallest drops of less than a dime were clustered in the Northeast, and Algonquin citygates were essentially flat.

With no changes in still-mild Northeast weather in sight, a utility buyer in the region expects to see range-bound cash trading for a while. “We’re still getting highs in the low 80s,” she said, adding that this may be the mildest summer ever for the Northeast and maybe the Midwest.

Although a maintenance-caused supply shortfall of about 600 MMcf/d at the Opal (WY) Plant will continue through Thursday, the Rockies and related markets were falling approximately as much Tuesday as they had spiked the day before. “People were more ready for the Opal outages today [Tuesday]” and responded more readily by re-sourcing supplies or pulling from storage, a marketer explained. There had been some sign of that happening late Monday when a lot of Rockies prices were coming off big-time from their daily highs as traders adjusted to the outage, she added. A low-linepack warning by Kern River (see Transportation Notes) almost certainly was caused by the Opal situation and probably kept Kern River numbers from falling as much as neighboring pipes connected to Opal, she said.

“It’s a dead market,” the marketer went on, noting that the ongoing Colorado Oil & Gas Association meeting in Denver and other conferences were drawing many traders out of their offices.

A Midcontinent/Midwest trader agreed that things seemed very quiet Tuesday on his first day back from vacation. “There’s almost no difference from 10 days back when I left: Chicago is trading virtually flat to Henry Hub, and we’re shutting off field transport [from the Midcontinent] and buying more at the citygate” because the pipeline costs don’t work currently,” he said. He perceived NGPL’s Amarillo Line as trading at a premium this week due to the Opal outage reducing volumes on Trailblazer that are normally delivered to NGPL. In fact, “I don’t think any Rockies volumes are coming east until Opal gets back to full operation,” he said.

A Florida utility buyer said she had no deals to report because the state continues to get rain often enough to keep cooling load down — and, not coincidentally, keep operational constraints on Florida Gas Transmission to a minimum.

The National Weather Service has another basically bearish forecast for next week. The only area where it sees above normal temperatures in the Aug. 11-15 period is a relatively sparsely populated one — from the desert Southwest through the Rockies into the Upper Plains. Otherwise NWS predicts below normal readings south and east of a line from the New York City area westward to Ohio and then curving southward into East Texas. Most of the three West Coast states are likely to be below normal also.

Although the National Hurricane Center was not posting advisories on it yet, what The Weather Channel characterized as a “well defined tropical wave” was about 175 miles east of the Leeward Islands (the northern half of the Lesser Antilles chain between Puerto Rico and Venezuela) Tuesday and could bring squally weather to the islands over the next 24 hours as it moved westward at 10-15 mph.

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