Based primarily on the previous day’s 25.1-cent run-up by October futures, but also getting a slight boost from a pinch of extra cooling load returning to the desert Southwest and parts of the South along with forecasts of Friday lows in the 30s in upstate New York and some New England locations, the cash market was flat to higher across the board Thursday.

A large majority of gains were in single digits as overall prices ranged from flat to up nearly 20 cents. The Houston Ship Channel scored the biggest uptick; Texas peak temperatures, while still unseasonably mild in the low to mid 80s, will be inching slightly higher this weekend in some parts of the Lone Star State.

The Energy Information Administration’s report of a 67 Bcf storage injection was a near-repetition from the previous week as it was again just barely below consensus expectations in the 68-70 Bcf area. Nymex traders had a moderately bullish response in pushing October futures 9.5 cents higher as the contract began its three-day settlement process (see related story).

Parts of the desert Southwest such as Phoenix, where highs had cooled off into the mid 90s earlier in the week, will be hitting the 100 area again Friday, according to Weather Central, rejoining heat levels from the mid 90s to around 100 in interior California. And while highs in the South will still be fairly moderate, more sections of the region will be reaching the high 80s than previously. Meanwhile, lows not far above freezing in the upper Northeast likely are contributing a smidgen of heating demand to the overall market.

Otherwise, the general weather outlook remains fairly bearish for gas prices, with forecasts of moderate to cool dominant. Even the eastern Rockies area is starting to warm up from a recent cold spell.

After about a week of not detecting any significant Atlantic tropical activity, the National Hurricane Service was monitoring a tropical wave near the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa. The agency accorded the system a low chance of development into a tropical storm over the next two days.

PG&E is lifting a high-inventory OFO Friday. However, in a signal of mild weekend weather in the Northeast, affiliated pipelines Texas Eastern and Algonquin said due to their “limited operational flexibility to manage imbalances,” effective Saturday through Monday they will not be allowing any nominations for makeup of due-pipe imbalances or creation of due-shipper imbalances.

El Paso reported high linepack Thursday.

A Rockies producer said he was “really worried” about what might happen to regional prices if the outage of an Opal Plant unit set for next Tuesday and Wednesday (see Transportation Notes), which will put an extra 350 MMcf/d into the Rockies market, runs overtime into the annual testing shutdown of the Jackson Prairie storage facility and limited injections at the Clay Basin storage facility, both of which are scheduled in the first few days of October.

A surge of cold weather in the general Denver area is easing, and snow has quit in the surrounding mountains, the producer said, adding that he was still wearing a winter coat when he came to his office Thursday morning, “but I won’t need it going home this evening.” Usually CIG basis gets quite a bit closer to Henry Hub levels during Rockies cold spells, he said, but the Front Range area of Colorado was about the only section of the region to get “really cold” this time. It was considerably warmer in other Rockies city areas, he said.

The producer said he could attribute recent futures strength only to “a huge amount of short-covering in futures,” and cash was mostly following the screen. He noted that the October futures/Henry Hub spread has been fairly consistent this week, and is quite a gap in which to achieve convergence with only two more trading days left for the prompt-month contract. He expects futures to come down to meet cash more than vice versa.

A Southeast utility buyer felt free to take a vacation during bidweek, a colleague said, because his company didn’t plan to buy any October baseload anyway.

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