This week’s cash market rally apparently was running out ofsteam Wednesday. Eastern points were mostly flat, with a fewNortheast citygates dropping about a nickel. And except forisolated San Juan Basin and Malin gains, the West ranged from flatto more than a dime lower.

While Nymex’s response to the storage report was considerablyless drastic than on previous Wednesdays this summer, the screendid go from being more than a nickel higher during the morning toflat in the afternoon. The moderate bearishness was appropriate, acouple of sources said, since AGA’s figure of 65 Bcf injected lastweek either exceeded or was near the high end of most expectations.Continuing a recent pattern, well over half the injections occurredin the Consuming Region East and the heat-troubled Consuming RegionWest registered a tiny net withdrawal.

It’s no wonder that Northeast prices were generally a bit softerdespite the region finally experiencing some bona fide summer heat,one aggregator said. Comparative burnertip prices for fuel oil arekicking the stuffing out of gas for the time being, he added, andthat should keep a cap on gas numbers for a while.

The new weakness of Southern California border prices “reallygot our attention,” said a marketer. It was trading below baseloadfor the rest of August and next-month levels, and that hasn’t beenthe case for several weeks, he said. “We expected to sell the Calborder today [Wednesday], but wound up putting our gas intostorage.” Food processing load is growing in California and it’sthe hottest part of the year, so it’s no big deal that storageinjections are lagging in the West, he added.

The 2000 hurricane season seemed to be trying to make up forlost time this week after being a no-show in the Atlantic Basin forthe first two months. But the flurry of hurricanes, tropicalstorms/depressions/waves and disturbances ultimately boiled downto, as Mr. Shakespeare put it, events that were “full of sound andfury, [but] signifying nothing” to the natural gas market.

Oh sure, there were the usual price increases normallyattributed to “storm hype” early in the week, said one marketer,but those are fading away “and for now all these storms don’t meanmuch. We’ll have to wait for a ‘legitimate’ threat to Gulfproduction to come along.”

The Atlantic’s first hurricane this year, Alberto, wasdowngraded to a tropical storm (later bounced back to a minimalhurricane) and still remote from any land mass. Tropical Depression4 formed nearly 200 miles off Florida’s eastern coast, but it wasexpected to remain offshore. A tropical wave in the southern Bay ofCampeche appeared likely to do nothing more than provide rain inMexico, and a tropical disturbance in the Bahamas area didn’t seemto be going anywhere.

Cash bulls could take some consolation from the National WeatherService’s latest six- to 10-day forecast Wednesday. Except forbelow-normal temperatures predicted for the Louisiana/Texas GulfCoast production area, just about the entire rest of the nation canexpect mid-August heat ranging from normal to much-above-normal.And the much-above-normal forecast ranged from the Upper Plainsthrough the Mid-Atlantic, encompassing the key market areas of theMidwest and Northeast.

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