After another wild week in the natural gas futures arena, the prompt month took a much deserved day off Friday. Trading within a 21-cent band on the session, January natural gas limped to a $6.796 settle, down 1.5 cents from Thursday.

Compared to end-of-week settlements on Wednesday, Nov. 24, the January contract finished last week’s trading $1.843 lower than the previous week’s January and $1.18 lower than where the December contract expired.

The week’s trading mainly focused on the clean-up process following the prior week’s erroneous 49 Bcf storage withdrawal reported for the week ended Nov. 19, which was revised by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Thursday to a 17 Bcf pull due to a storage company reporting error.

“The resolution of the Nov. 19 storage number has obviously come to pass,” a Washington, DC-based broker said. “Not only did we reverse that uptrend that the erroneous number caused, we have completely changed the momentum. Now we have had equal violence on the downside.”

Commenting on the quiet end to the week, the broker said it appeared that the market was trying to settle itself ahead of the weekend. “I don’t know that there is that much more selling that people want to do at the end of the week, given how much money the shorts have made during the course of the week,” he said. “There seemed to be an awful lot of non-directional trading, with people trying not to get caught on the wrong side of another one of these runs.”

Looking ahead, the broker said Friday’s $6.69 low was a decent support level. Beyond that, $6.47 would be the next marker. “If we are going to make a stand, it will probably be in that $6.40 to $6.50 band,” he said.

As for the upside, the broker doesn’t see it happening anytime soon. “Before we see anything that could cause you to think about the upside, we will have to see at least a couple days of holding water here,” he said. “Any quick reversal up is liable to be very short-lived.”

While Friday went out with a whimper, reverberations from the messy storage situation still dominated the industry. The EIA erased the mistake Thursday, but the wild futures trading day on Nov. 24 will be on the books forever. Based on what appeared to be a very bullish storage report at the time, the December contract expired that day at $7.976, up $1.183, while January futures climbed $1.018 to settle at $8.639 (see Daily GPI, Nov. 29).

“That Wednesday had to be painful and very expensive for many people,” the broker said. “I don’t know whether that gives the daily storage reporting argument any traction. The bottom line is that human error will happen. You can’t take that out of the equation.”

The broker noted that while it appears the reporting error had no malicious intent behind it, the mistake caused a lot of financial distress for people.

Municipals on the losing end of the storage-caused price spike petitioned FERC commissioners Friday to act immediately to require daily storage reports. Joining industrial and chemical customers who issued their protests a day earlier, the American Public Gas Association (APGA) said consumers will pay almost a billion extra dollars for their natural gas in December due to the incorrect report (see related story).

Despite reports pinning blame for the storage snafu on a reporting mistake by El Paso’s ANR Pipeline, the company’s Kim Wallace denied that scenario. She assured NGI that ANR’s data was correct.

In the storage report for the week ended Nov. 26, which reported a 5 Bcf withdrawal, the EIA’s attached correction for the Nov. 19 report stated that the revision reflected “a resubmission of data from one or more respondents.” The government agency was mum on the source due to confidentiality agreements.

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