The cash market finally caved in Friday under the weight of verylittle heating demand and abundant available supplies, sendingprices lower for the first time in the fledgling March aftermarket.

Most of the declines were in the neighborhood of a dime, butthey ranged from around a nickel or less in California to 15 centsor so at some Northeast citygates.

“It was hard to see how gas prices could have kept rising whenthere’s almost no weather-related load to speak of,” said aNortheast trader who nonetheless reported most of the region’scitygates still at $3 or a little higher.

There wasn’t much utility load at all in intrastate Texas, butstorage demand was up a tad, said a Houston-based trader. He sawprices start off lower “and they trickled down by a penny more eachhour.” There was generally plenty of gas available, he said;however, after Katy prices had started in the low $2.70s, supplies”dried up” as soon as he started offering $2.68. “That’s telling methere was some Waha demand pulling that Katy gas west, which isdone by displacement on Oasis.”

Contrary to the declining numbers reported by the Texas trader,a marketer said Chicago citygates were coming back up during themorning as some buyers, expecting more in the way of weekendsoftness, got caught short. Continued storage demand also helpedsupport the Chicago market, she said. “You can tell they’re storagebuyers because of the size of the volume being thrown around.Chances are, packages of 50 MMcf/d are not going to the burnertipwith the weather so mild.”

El Paso had ended maintenance at the Gallup (NM) Station, sosome previously constrained Southwest supplies became availableagain, a marketer said. Transport from San Juan Basin to theSouthern California border got quite economical as the border-basinspread widened to about 20 cents, he added.

A Calgary source reported shunning Kingsgate purchases as tooexpensive and buying instead at Stanfield. Despite NOVA changingimbalance tolerances because of excess linepack, intra-Albertaprices crept back up to C$3.47 in the afternoon after starting theday just under C$3.40, she said. She thought the uptrend waslargely due to the screen eventually achieving an increase of alittle over 4 cents after spending much of the morning close toflat (intra-Alberta gas trades all day and is not subject to the11:30 a.m. CST daily nominations deadline in the U.S.).

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