Eastern markets proved unable to sustain the bullishness of the day before and registered drops ranging from a nickel to 20 cents or so Wednesday. Thanks to heavy air conditioning load in some sections and supply issues, however, the West was able to keep its numbers flat to up more than 20 cents in the Rockies.

A screen decline of just over 13 cents, along with a retreat of short-lived warm weather support in such areas as the Midwest, had a couple of traders expecting more softness Thursday. Expectations of yet another triple-digit volume in the Energy Information Administration’s storage injection report Thursday morning also added to bearish feelings, they said.

Wednesday’s eastern softness was characterized as chiefly a “correction” of the gains on Tuesday by a Northeast utility buyer. He didn’t really think there was enough hot weather to have justified the Tuesday upticks. “We certainly didn’t have any AC [air conditioning] load of any significance in the Northeast,” the buyer commented. He and other sources said trading activity was very quiet.

A Midwest utility buyer said temperatures in her city got as high as 84 degrees Tuesday, but it was considerably cooler “by late afternoon when we were going home. And a storm this afternoon [Wednesday] should cool things off again.” The region is due for mid 70s highs by the weekend, she said. “Some people were talking about that disturbance in the Caribbean [see below],” the buyer went on, but she thought they were just grasping for any psychological bullish factors they could find. “We were pleased to see prices go down today and hope we get a great big storage injection number from EIA Thursday” that would keep prices moving lower, she said.

East-of-California markets are giving inland California a lot of competition for power generation supplies from Southwest basins, a western marketer said. In addition, an Unauthorized Overpull Penalty alert on El Paso (see Transportation Notes) and a six-day maintenance project that starts Thursday at the Opal Plant and will constrain as much as much as 260 MMcf/d at times (see Transportation Notes) helped bolster western prices in general, she added. The marketer also noted that slowly rising temperatures in Texas meant that intrastate demand is starting to pick up again for Permian/Waha gas.

A tropical wave was moving off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula into the Bay of Campeche Wednesday, The Weather Channel reported. “The upper-level winds in the region remain moderate and will make any development, if any, slow to occur,” it said.

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