Wednesday’s cash market was almost a repeat of activity the day before, with flat to mildly higher numbers dominating across the board. Bet on a radical change from that staidness today, though. After AGA announced both a large upward revision of last week’s widely derided 3 Bcf storage injection figure plus a new increase that exceeded nearly all expectations, the screen responded with a dive of more than 30 cents.

There was no dissension among sources predicting that cash numbers are in for a steep fall today. They cited the screen example, a continuance of mostly mild weather fundamentals, and the near-disappearance of Tropical Depression Chantal (although another storm was headed toward the Bahamas).

A Gulf Coast producer is expecting a cash drop of about 30 cents today to closely match the Wednesday afternoon performance of futures. He also looks for the physical market to continue closely tracking screen movement for the rest of the month. He and a marketer agreed that demand from Gulf Coast-area electric utilities had begun to ease off a bit.

Naturally the AGA report was a hot topic of conversation yesterday. The association hit the trading community with a double whammy: first, a quite bearish last-week build of 86 Bcf in storage inventories; and second, the acknowledgement that it had gotten erroneous data in making the report of only 3 Bcf injected for the week ending Aug. 10. The goof came in the Consuming Region East, which actually had an injection of 35 Bcf instead of a 12 Bcf withdrawal, making a net swing of 47 Bcf. That meant last week’s report should have been 50 Bcf instead of the extremely dubious 3 Bcf.

As one marketer said in his best Ricky Ricardo imitation, “Somebody’s got some `splaining to do.” He went on, “I think AGA should be really embarrassed. What they did caused a lot of financial hardship to many people, both physical and futures traders. You can see what kind of impact it had on futures today, moving drastically in the opposite direction from last week.”

Another source was similarly upset. “How do you make such a huge revision without giving some explanation of who reported the bad data? There needs to be some kind of investigation about this matter,” he said.

Goodbye Chantal, hello Dean. After brushing the Bay of Campeche, the dissipating Chantal headed back south into onshore Mexico where it was about 30 miles south of Villahermosa Wednesday, the National Weather Service said. It said there would be no further Chantal advisories “unless regeneration occurs.” Meanwhile, even before Chantal could fully exit the market stage, Tropical Storm Dean was “racing north-northwestward” through the area between Puerto Rico and the Bahamas, NWS said. Its center was about 85 miles north-northwest of San Juan, Puerto Rico Wednesday afternoon. The storm packed maximum sustained winds near 60 mph.

Williams Field Services had hoped to restore full operations at the Opal Plant in Wyoming by Wednesday night (see Daily GPI, Aug. 22), but now that appears more likely to occur at any time today, a spokesman said. The plant may be able to allow intraday increases in processing nominations. Throughput for Tuesday’s gas day was a little better than previously expected, averaging 470 MMcf/d compared to the normal 800 MMcf/d, the spokesman said.

Intra-Alberta prices tended to match the general market with mild firmness for much of the day, a Calgary trader said. But since intra-Alberta trading continues on through the afternoon unlike other points, provincial prices demonstrated their usual screen-tracking tendency by “dropping like a rock” into the mid C$3.50s in late-afternoon deals, he said.

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