Putting hurricane worries aside for at least the weekend, traders bowed Friday to near-term forecasts of mild to cool weather in most of the U.S. and Canada and the bearish day-later reverberations of a storage injection report that wasn’t much shy of 100 Bcf. Nearly all points recorded double-digit losses; the overall range was from less than a dime to 30 cents.

“Obviously the Nymex people had their qualms about going into the weekend short with a hurricane active,” said a Mid-Atlantic marketer, referring to the short-covering rally that was credited with turning a negative futures performance during the morning into a small gain of nearly 3 cents by the end of the day. “There were no such concerns in the cash market.”

With the center of Hurricane Isabel still well out in the Atlantic, about 350 miles northeast of the northern Leeward Islands as of 5 p.m. AST Friday, cash traders could afford to be nonchalant. The very powerful Category 5 storm was moving toward the west at nearly 9 mph, a general motion that was expected to continue for the next 24 hours, the National Hurricane Center said. Although such a heading was pointed at the Gulf of Mexico entryway between southern Florida and Cuba, forecasters were projecting that Isabel would eventually turn more towards a rendezvous with either the East Coast or Bermuda (still recovering from its pummeling by Hurricane Fabian).

If it should become clear at some point next week that Isabel has no chance of disrupting offshore production, you can expect more major price softness like Friday’s, said one source.

The Northeast saw several of the weekend’s larger declines of more than 20 cents. That was hardly surprising since the region currently has virtually nothing in either heating or cooling load, one trader said. That’s what happens when low temperatures don’t get much below 60 and highs don’t get much above 70, he said.

It’s been a funny market this month in the Gulf Coast, the trader continued. “Some points like Trunkline seem short, and some like Transco Station 65 seem long.” On another topic, he noted that traders “still have plenty of September left and all of October to fill storage, so there’s no urgency there.”

Southern California border numbers came under extra downward pressure after SoCalGas declared an Overnominations Day for Saturday, indicating that too much gas was trying to enter its system. Curiously, the event seemed to have little effect in San Juan Basin, which saw the day’s smallest declines on either side of a nickel in El Paso’s Bondad and Blanco pools.

There seemed to be more impact from SoCal’s OFO-like action in the Permian Basin, which experienced considerably greater softness than San Juan. That may have been the first visible impact of El Paso’s FERC-mandated Sept. 1 shift of East-of-California customers from full requirements to contract demand status, forcing them to shift some of their buying from San Juan to Permian sources (see Daily GPI, Sept. 8).

Waha/Permian quotes also suffered from the intrastate Texas market growing even weaker. Rain storms helped keep Friday’s high temperatures in Houston and Dallas from getting much above 80 degrees.

As something of a corollary, a marketer reported having to deal with nominations problems Friday afternoon on Transwestern’s Panhandle Lateral. People with Transwestern capacity from Waha either into Texas or up to the Midcontinent were choosing the more lucrative Midcontinent deliveries, and the result was a logjam of gas, she said.

The Mid-Atlantic marketer mentioned above said he had seen forecasts that Isabel could make it into his region, adding, “I sure hope not. You don’t want to wish something like that on anybody,” but then again it’s not like anyone gets to put hurricane movement up for a popular vote.

Analyst Kyle Cooper of Citigroup said his initial estimation for this week’s storage report calls for an injection of nearly 90 Bcf, which would compare with year-ago and five-year average volumes of 69 Bcf and 76 Bcf respectively.

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