Mostly flat numbers made it three days in a row Monday as the dominant market characteristic. Whereas small declines outweighed the small upticks on Friday, there was more of a tendency toward slightly higher pricing yesterday.

There were also more exceptions to the general flatness. Northeast citygates jumped from a nickel to about 20 cents in New England after a winter storm Sunday that was particularly severe offshore caused a production outage at the Sable Offshore Energy Project.

Due to the SOEP shutdown, “all volumes scheduled into Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline have been significantly reduced by upstream parties” for the gas days of Sunday and Monday, the pipeline said. However, a spokesman for Duke Energy, operator of the U.S. portion of M&NE, said SOEP production was coming back up again Monday afternoon. He didn’t expect any further cuts Tuesday, but said it could be a “recovery day” for the pipeline.

A Calgary-based producer thought the M&NE shortfall was responsible for a “pop” in Iroquois Zone 2 quotes, leaving the point in the unusual position of trading above Transco’s two Zone 6 pools Monday.

A Canadian Press story quoted experts as saying a “weather bomb” had hit the Maritimes provinces of eastern Canada Sunday. Winds peaking at 164 kilometers per hour, or more than hurricane force, caused the Sable shutdown.

Although not as strong as the Nor’easter that blew in Sunday, snow would be returning to New England Monday night and Tuesday, one forecaster said.

California, Southwest and Rockies/Pacific Northwest prices also were a little stronger than the overall market, with gains around a nickel at most western points, and San Juan quotes rising more than a dime. Although the desert Southwest weather will be mild, most of the rest of the West will be 5-10 degrees below mid-January averages, according to The Weather Channel.

On the negative side of Monday’s price spectrum, Florida citygates fell about 15 cents to the mid $2.70s due to Florida Gas Transmission lifting a 10-day high-linepack notice over the weekend. The decline left the Florida gate, which had reigned for more than a week as the market’s most expensive point, trailing New England deliveries.

Numbers were trending higher as the morning went on, sources in several areas reported. A Midwestern source watching snow come down Monday afternoon said current weather was colder than last week’s forecasts had indicated, “which helped bring prices up a bit.” He also noted moderately higher gas futures, although the heating oil and crude oil Nymex contracts were being battered.

But an East Coast utility’s fuel buyer said he was “not seeing that much weather demand. We’re just playing the price spreads where we can find them.” He also noted that his company still is not using much gas out of storage. “We have a mix of some storage that we have to cycle out this winter, but other [storage] supplies that we can leave through summer, which we expect to do.” He thinks a lot of people who have the option of leaving gas in storage until next winter will be following much the same strategy.

Calling trader activity “still pretty quiet, about like last week,” a Gulf Coast marketer agreed that current weather “is not that big a deal.” He said he had to assume that prices are being supported because people are still injecting about as much storage as they are withdrawing it. “If everybody started pulling storage out of the ground, this market would collapse in a heartbeat,” he commented.

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