The February aftermarket got launched Monday on a quiet note and with losses outweighing gains. Weather trends were toward moderation in several regions, although parts of the Southeast were still recovering from a weekend ice storm that had left thousands without power.

Scattered gains ranging from a couple of pennies to nearly 20 cents tended to cluster in the Gulf Coast, Midcontinent and Permian/Waha areas. Otherwise, overall declines ran as high as about 60 cents for the most part; the conspicuous exception was Transco Zone 6-New York City’s latest dollar-plus dive.

Sources concurred that very little if any new February baseload trading remained to be done Monday. There were probably a few deals being made to tie up loose ends, said a Gulf Coast marketer, but most traders seem to have finished last Thursday or Friday. His own company wrapped things up early Friday, he said.

It looks like the market should stay quiet for a while with most of the heavy heating load of the last couple of weeks in the process of fading, the marketer continued. Of course, a new blast of cold will stir things up again, but nothing like that was in sight as of Monday, he said. He reported some blockage of offshore HIOS supplies over the weekend, but said that had ended by Monday and generally transport was running smoothly.

An Upper Midwest trader said it was snowing in her city Monday morning, “but that was expected.” The forecast was for milder temperatures for the next week or so in her area, she said, noting that after some of the most intense cold last week, “30 degrees feels almost like a heat wave” in comparison.

A Northeast marketer was thinking along the same lines, saying that compared to where it was in the last two weeks, the Northeast was getting “very moderate.” He expects the current warming trend to continue all through this week, saying temperatures were already above seasonal levels Monday. Basis had narrowed to 85-115 cents from Henry Hub to various Northeast delivery points, he observed. In general, look for a mostly softer week, with not much extra heating load to be found anywhere, the marketer said.

Having been used a couple of times earlier this winter to illustrate why growing heating load was raising Midcontinent/Midwest prices, turnabout is fair play for Northern Natural Gas’ projection of system weighted temperatures. Saying its normal average at this time of year is 17 degrees, NNG said its expects the system average to run from 31 degrees Monday to 31 again Tuesday, 33 Wednesday and 35 Thursday.

The level of remaining Gulf of Mexico shut-ins attributable to the passage of Hurricane Ivan last September has finally dropped below half a Bcf/d. Minerals Management Service (MMS) said its tally of Ivan-related outages was 489.39 MMcf/d Monday, down 69.30 MMcf/d from the prior report on Jan. 18. MMS said total deferred production since Sept. 11, 2004 had mounted to 165.751 Bcf, or 3.725% of the Gulf’s usual annual output of about 4.45 Tcf.

Lehman Brothers analyst Thomas Driscoll is forecasting a storage withdrawal of 185 Bcf to be reported for the week ending Jan. 28. “We think that the current storage level is modestly bearish for natural gas prices over the next several months,” Driscoll continued. “We believe that normal weather through the end of March would lead to an April 1 storage level of about 1.2 Tcf — higher than the five-year average of 1,022 Bcf.”

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