With a little help from the previous day’s futures advance, spreading cold weather was able to keep prices on the rise at nearly all points Wednesday. Only flat numbers at a couple of Rockies points prevented gains across the board. Otherwise, upticks ranged from 2 cents to about 35 cents.

The climb in prices remained fairly subdued, as a solid majority of Wednesday’s increases were less than a dime. Northeast citygates, where temperatures will be around freezing Thursday and expected to go even lower by the weekend, saw all of the day’s biggest gains.

The Midwest is chipping in with some heating load of its own, although not as much as in the Northeast. A cold front is chilling out the northern reaches of the South, but heating demand there wasn’t considered very substantial. Flooding rains in California through the weekend are the chief weather concern in the West, where temperatures outside the upper Rockies are relatively mild for mid-February.

The screen took back most of Tuesday’s increase with a loss of 6.6 cents Wednesday, which may act as a drag on continued cash bullishness at some points Thursday, one source said. However, that may be counterbalanced somewhat by spikes in petroleum-related futures, he added. Despite a seemingly bearish report of rising oil product inventories Wednesday, crude oil for March delivery shot up more than a dollar to settle above $48/bbl based on what a news report was concern that OPEC will cut production this spring.

A producer noted that basis from the Gulf Coast’s Henry Hub to Transco Zone 6-New York City widened from a little under half a dollar Tuesday to about 65 cents Wednesday, and the spread was nearly a dime higher at New England citygates. Weather was the Northeast’s main price booster, he said, but a bit of screen support from Tuesday also played a part. “Normal” high temperatures of just above freezing were expected Thursday in the New York City area, but they will keep falling into the upper 20s from Friday through the weekend, the producer added. He thinks it will be “interesting to see how well prices stand up” and whether basis continues to widen.

Although no OFO-like conditions surfaced, minor constraints were increasing on Northeast pipelines such as Tennessee, Texas Eastern and Algonquin. On the other side of the pipeline coin, the West’s Kern River was reporting high linepack in all segments and Westcoast had set its imbalance tolerances to encourage drafting.

A Gulf Coast marketer said cash followed the screen “a bit.” Wednesday was still pretty much the same routine market that has dominated trading so far in February, he said, but Thursday could be “a key day” because of the weekly storage report. He said he was kind of glad that the market had settled into a low-volatility period that mostly mixes price movement up and down by a nickel or so, adding, “I know our customers didn’t like it” back when prices were seeing big changes just about every day.

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