This week’s market started out much like the previous one — with seemingly not enough cold weather overall to justify big price jumps, but traders managed to find enough demand anyway to drive spikes that occasionally reached about a dollar or more Monday.

Distribution of the soaring numbers was fairly even across market areas as gains ranged from a little more than C50 cents (Empress) to a little more than $1.10 (Kingsgate).

Monday’s cash market had 8.2 cents worth of prior-trading-day support from December futures; the Tuesday session will have a little more than half of that after the prompt-month contract ended its next-to-last trading day up 4.9 cents (see related story).

There were some signs that much like a week earlier, the amount of early-week heating load may have been underestimated. Lows around freezing are due Tuesday in the western Midwest and Midcontinent, while temperatures will bottom out in the 20s and even teens in a few cases in the general Rockies region (as far south as Albuquerque, NM), Alberta and south-central Canada.

However, cool to merely chilly conditions continue to dominate the overall outlook for Canada and the U.S. through at least Tuesday.

Traders may have been looking ahead to the below-normal temperatures predicted during the Nov. 28-Dec. 2 period for the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. in the National Weather Service’s (NWS) six- to 10-day forecast posted Sunday afternoon. Of particular interest were the well-below-normal readings expected in the heavily populated area along the East Coast from lower New England through Florida and extending inland as far as eastern Michigan and western Mississippi. NWS did not predict any significant areas with above-normal temperatures.

SoCalGas has a high-linepack OFO remaining in effect through at least Tuesday. And despite NWS expecting a pretty cold last half of the holiday weekend for the eastern U.S., Texas Eastern and Algonquin added their own restrictions against linepack-increasing nominations starting Thanksgiving Day (see Transportation Notes) to one already announced by MRT (see Daily GPI, Nov. 18).

A Midwest marketer marveled at how much the Friday-Monday market changes emulated those of a week earlier. Michigan citygates were up almost a dollar to the mid $4.00s Monday from about $3.10 going into the weekend. He said there may be people finding enough account space to top off storage, and even his own company has a couple of agricultural customers that are still buying spot gas to dry corn crops due to a rainy autumn.

The marketer said his area is far enough west of the NWS call for extremely below-normal temperatures starting Saturday that it looks like relatively moderate temperatures will continue through the holiday weekend.

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