Although air conditioning load in the South will slacken Friday under a widespread set of thunderstorms and weather-related demand remains scarce elsewhere, cash prices made it a solid four-for-four days of bullish performance so far this week Thursday.

A prior-day screen advance of nearly 20 cents and the fact that cooling load for gas remains substantial because of shoulder-month maintenance on power plants that use other fuels were credited with sustaining the four-day gains. Buying for storage injections also played a part, one source said.

A flat Texas Eastern -East Texas notwithstanding, prices were rising faster again after a Wednesday slowdown as nearly all other points registered double-digit gains Thursday. The overall increases ranged from a little more than a nickel to about 45 cents and were fairly evenly distributed among geographic market areas.

Wet and windy are the weather watchwords for much of the South Friday as a front moves eastward from the western Gulf Coast. High temperatures will be receding from the 90s experienced earlier in the week to the 70s and 80s. The Northeast is due for some cooler conditions going into the weekend, but temperatures will still be relatively moderate.

Whether the physical market can keep rising Friday was doubtful. Besides the usual weekend slump in industrial load and milder weather in the South, cash prices have lost the prior-day screen backing they enjoyed earlier in the week (Nymex’s May natural gas contract fell 12.8 cents Thursday as crude oil futures backed off slightly from their record-setting heights of Wednesday).

Midwest residents will continue to feel unseasonable warmth through the weekend. Mountain-area snows are still predicted in the West, but most of the region will experience thermometer levels 10-20 degrees above normal.

Volumes quoted at the Southern California border rose by nearly 450 MMcf/d from Wednesday as Southern California Gas completed a Line 225 project Thursday that had taken a huge bite out of Wheeler Ridge delivery capacity since Tuesday.

A bit of supply tightness is supporting western prices. Kern River continued to report low linepack in its three farthest downstream segments Thursday, and PG&E was projecting linepack levels Friday and Saturday at or near the bottom of its target range.

A Gulf Coast producer said he didn’t expect regional prices to be as strong as they were since Southern heat was starting to let up. He had to assume that maintenance outages of nuclear and coal power plants meant power generators were still calling on gas-fired peaking units. This week has seen the first major heat wave of the year, he said, so people were not used to it and “cranked those ACs [air conditioners] up.”

Trading for the weekend will be interesting, the producer continued. The Northeast will be cooling down to the 50s and the South will be backing off those near-100-degree temperatures, he noted. There might be a tiny bit of heating load in the market area, but nothing significant, he said. Based primarily on the screen decline, he expects mostly weaker prices Friday.

A Midcontinent producer also expressed “a little surprise” at how strong prices were. He observed that Midcontinent numbers has tightened their spread from the Henry Hub. Earlier in the week the Midcontinent-Hub spread was more than $1.60, and now it’s a little more than $1.30, he said, adding that he wasn’t sure why that happened. Restrictions at the Nicor citygate have gotten Chicago markets “skittish,” he said, and the citygate is more thinly traded than usual. The producer said he “really saw Chicago volumes drop off for Friday.”

A utility buyer in the Lower Midwest said his area was hot last week, “but pretty moderate now.” His company is not buying any spot gas currently. The weather is warmer than normal but not hot enough to get much power generation load going yet, he said. So far in April heating degree days are 50% less than normal, he said.

Northern Natural Gas is still allocating storage injections because their facilities are already pretty close to full, the buyer went on. The pipeline will begin a restriction on interruptible IDD service injections Saturday that will last through July 31, he said. That means that if a customer has a positive storage imbalance as of Saturday, it can’t add anything to the IDD account until August.

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