Cash prices caught their second wind Wednesday, with across-the-board gains between a dime and a little more than 20 cents generally representing larger increases than those on Tuesday. Storage buying, making up for nuclear plant outages and a slow rebuild of air conditioning load across the South following a cooler-weather dip earlier in the week were again cited as factors in the run-up.

However, screen support was missing in action Wednesday as natural gas futures spent the morning moderately in the red before eventually eking out a minuscule advance of 0.6 cents. That had a couple of sources questioning whether this week’s uphill climb in cash numbers had run its course and if the physical market was due for a pullback Thursday. But another trader pointed to continued strong increases in the crude oil and heating oil contracts as a mitigating factor, noting that crude had finished the day above $29/bbl.

Still, to a western marketer “everything still seems bullish” even though Nymex price movement had bogged down. Swing cash is trading flat to next-month levels, she said, and Henry Hub’s rise of nearly 20 cents while gas futures were static means the cash-to-Nymex spread is tightening. Nuclear plant outages and storage concerns in the East are the current main market features, she said, explaining that storage is not so much an issue in the West, which failed to draw down its inventories as extensively last winter as the East did.

Maintenance-related production cuts in Jonah Field behind the Opal Plant (see Transportation Notes) had little impact on the Rockies market, where declines of about a dime were among Wednesday’s smallest. One source reported seeing western basis spreads flattening out, “so you can barely can cover variable costs out of the Rockies depending on which pipe you’re using.”

A Northeast trader also was having issues with transportation costs. “Transport differentials from the Gulf Coast are not so good right now,” he said. “You can still make a little margin [moving gas] to Transco Zone 6, but it doesn’t work at all for [Texas Eastern] M-3.” Northeast weather that’s good for personal comfort right now (high of about 70 degrees in his area Wednesday) isn’t so good for gas demand, the trader remarked.

But a marketer was pleased with his situation on Florida Gas Transmission. A recent run of market-area Overage Alert Day notices raised the spread from the pipe’s Zones 2 and 3 to the citygate into the half-dollar vicinity, allowing a “good margin,” he said. He was “sort of surprised” by Wednesday’s end of OADs, commenting, “You’ll probably see a lull in FGT business now, especially at the citygate. During the week of Alert Days most shippers were running up positive imbalances, and now they’ll be working those off while the OAD isn’t in effect.”

A producer quoting an intraday intra-Alberta sale in the mid C$6.80s said a lot of plant turnarounds are under way in the province, “so our volumes will be small” into next week. Calgary and the surrounding area had about 10 straight days of snow through last week, “but it was light snow that mainly just annoyed people,” she said. Weather has become decidedly more springlike since then, the producer said, with temperatures around 19 degrees Celsius (mid 60s F.) Wednesday afternoon. Most Canadian traders will be taking off Victoria Day next Monday but won’t observe the U.S. Memorial Day holiday, using it primarily as a paperwork catch-up day, she said.

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