While the East looked around and, seeing nearly all appreciable weather load fading fast, decided to sit tight or retreat a bit price-wise Wednesday, most western points were soaring in a frenzy of buying. California and Rockies pipes saw spikes that often hit triple digits. Only flatness in the Pacific Northwest and at a couple of Permian Basin points, along with a downturn for intra-Alberta numbers, belied the overall western strength.

“It’s going to be in the 70s here by the weekend, and I guarantee we’ll be seeing virtually no heating or cooling load at all,” said a trader in the Midwest. However, prices were trending higher as the morning went on, he said, expressing relief at picking up a MichCon package in the upper $5.40s before numbers later moved into the $5.50s.

A few sources were puzzled when the screen showed little reaction to what many considered at least a moderately bullish storage report Wednesday afternoon. AGA said a net total 49 Bcf of working gas (plus another 2 Bcf of base gas in the Producing Region) got withdrawn last week, a volume that was towards the upper end of expectations and greatly surpassed results from the end of the withdrawal season last year. “In the past Nymex has usually gone wild, either up or down, following a report like that,” one marketer observed. “This time they [futures traders] were fairly sedate,” pushing post-report numbers only a few cents higher.

A producer attributed the big Rockies price jumps mainly to Clay Basin storage injections becoming available again today. “Everybody wants to pound as much gas back into the ground as they can” before summer air conditioning demand starts pushing prices even higher, he reasoned. Traders also were looking ahead to the Kern River expansion this summer, figuring that will significantly tighten Rockies basis for whatever gas they can sock away now, the producer said.

Rockies prices also got a boost from the California market, he continued, as the northern half of the state experiences what one forecaster called “extremely unseasonable” cold temperatures that could persist into the weekend. Southern California wasn’t quite as cold but still feeling more chill than normal. Power generation load in the Golden State also remained robust due to nuclear outages and a reported loss of 3,000 MW due to a north-south transmission line outage, the producer said.

California border basis into SoCalGas for May retreated a bit from numbers near approaching plus $10 the day before, a couple of sources said, but still remained fairly high in a plus $8.40-9.00 range Wednesday.

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