Cash prices gave their best efforts Tuesday at imitating theprevious day’s screen rise of slightly over 35 cents, and quite afew points came close. But when the initially firmer July futurescontract made an abrupt about-face at mid-morning Tuesday andheaded south to eventually wind up the day more than a dime lower,cash numbers dutifully followed the screen’s lead once again inlate trading.

Gains of 20 cents or more dominated at nearly all points, withsome advancing by more than 30 cents.The Rockies and PG&Ecitygate were among the rare markets failing to go up as much as 20cents.

A Northeast trader said he was “throwing a dart on this one” inquoting a Transco Zone 6-NYC average in the $4.70s because thepoint had started the day around $4.90, up 30 cents from Monday’shighest quote, but fallen into the low to mid $4.60s in the lastfew deals. Chilly temperatures are keeping current air conditioningload at virtually nothing in the Northeast and Midwest marketareas, he said, but are due to warm up by this weekend.

A cold front had permeated the South far enough that airconditioning load in that region was falling, a marketer said. Thatlikely was why he was seeing relatively little electric marketeffect from a weekend outage of a unit at the South Texas NuclearProject; the unit was at 8% operations Tuesday, according to theNuclear Regulatory Commission.

A trader who was making his early Midcontinent purchases in themid $4.30s said he was glad he waited long enough to snag his lastANR Southwest package about a dime lower. The late morning softnesswas almost in lockstep with the screen’s decline, he said.

Northwest maintenance immediately downstream of Sumas continuedto put a bottleneck on Canadian exports and make domestic productmore valuable. The spread between the two markets remained about aquarter Tuesday.

On Monday a maintenance outage of a Wyoming gathering system andprocessing plant collectively known as Jonah Field had taken asubstantial amount of Rockies gas off the market, a marketerreported. The field connects to Questar and to Kern River andNorthwest through the Opal Hub, so its outage sent peoplescrambling for other Opal-connected supplies to replace it, he wenton. However, people were finding workarounds to the Sumas and Opalconstraints Tuesday, so Rockies upticks tended to lag the overallfirmness as demand was relatively weak, the marketer said. TheJonah outage is expected to continue through Thursday.

An aggregator admitted taking “a bit of a beating” inintra-Alberta deals. While making same-day Aeco sales in the mid tohigh C$5.30s, his first couple of deals for today’s flow were ashigh as $5.47. But because the intra-Alberta market closely tracksscreen movement all day, his last set of next-day quotes had fallento the low to mid C$5.30s.

Most prior estimates of AGA’s storage report this afternoon fellin the 50-70 Bcf range, with guesses in the vicinity of 60 Bcfbeing most common. Even an injection as high as 70 Bcf wouldcompare with a year-ago figure of 91 Bcf, one source noted, andwould increase the year-on-year deficit by at least 20 Bcf.

A Texas marketer said it’s a close call whether cash and futurestraders will treat a report within most expectations as bearish orbullish. However, “anything 50 [Bcf] or less and we’ll definitelybe seeing a $4.60 or higher screen,” he said.

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