After having settled at $6.697 on Monday, June natural gas futures on Tuesday could make it no higher than $6.675 following a sell-off in overnight Access trading. Beginning its regular session slide just before 11:30 a.m. EDT, the prompt month ended up recording a $6.50 low just before settling at $6.515, down 18.2 cents on the day.

The natural gas futures market appeared to side with weakness in petroleum futures instead of using colder weather conditions as a support structure, leaving bulls on the sidelines for the session.

The petroleum futures complex was weak Tuesday as June crude closed $1.42 lower at $49.50/bbl. June heating oil and June unleaded gas settled 2.72 cents and 5.51 cents lower at $1.4360/gallon and $1.4594/gallon, respectively.

The $6.50 mark was the lowest a prompt month has been during a regular trading session since Feb. 25, when the April futures contract reached a low of $6.42. The $6.515 settle was the lowest of any prompt month since the March contract expired on Feb. 24 at $6.304.

“We saw that $6.50 on Tuesday, but I think we could conceivably be going lower,” said Ed Kennedy of Commercial Brokerage Corp. in Miami. “That close below $6.54 bothers me. I have fur and claws anyway, but I thought we would consolidate a little bit more.”

Kennedy said his next target lower is the $6.25 level. “We did see some scaled-down buying by end-users, but not bedrock support by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “We may have to get closer to that $6.25 to find that, I think.”

As to whether the $6.25 level could signal a bottoming, Kennedy said it is unclear. “He who picks bottom catches avalanche,” he said.

Natural gas bulls are still hopeful that ultimately warm weather or the expectations of warm weather this summer will turn the current price slide around. “The industry is about a year or two overdue for a warm summer, and a hot summer could break the current linkage with the softening petroleum market,” said a trader with ABN AMRO New York.

On the other hand, short-term cold weather may help alleviate what is considered to be a growing surplus of natural gas. As AccuWeather predicted, the Northeastern quarter of the country saw another chilly day Tuesday as cold air drives southward all the way from the Arctic islands. This is quite an unusual setup for early May. As a result, high temperatures will be more typical of March rather than May. The greatest deviation from normal will be in the area of lakes Erie and Ontario where the cold air, combined with plenty of clouds, will keep temperatures generally in the 40s, AccuWeather reported.

Although the threat of any short-term impact from bone-chilling winter-like temperatures has long passed, cooler-than-normal temperatures could help slow injections, thereby reducing the buildup of plentiful storage supplies for the fall and winter heating season. This week the National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts cooler-than-normal temperatures and above-normal accumulations of heating degree days (HDD) for the large gas-consuming markets of the Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest.

For the week ending May 7, the NWS expects the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to experience 94 HDD, 21 above normal. Meanwhile, the high gas-consuming states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio should see 101 HDD, a healthy 24 above normal. If this pace of HDD accumulation continues, the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states will be well ahead of the pace for a typical May.

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