This week’s overall cash market rally was running out of steam for the most part Wednesday as mostly moderate weather and brimming storage facilities took their toll on the majority of prices. However, most western points were able to rise due to rising heat levels in the desert Southwest, chilly weather in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest and the easing of some excess supply/storage constraints.

As a producer had predicted Tuesday, Wednesday’s losses were fairly small in ranging from 2-3 cents to about 15 cents. Nearly all of them occurred in eastern markets. But several eastern points — mostly in the Midcontinent — joined western counterparts with flat to about $1.45 higher quotes.

The Wednesday cash market had a small amount of support from the previous day’s 3.9-cent gain by November futures, but Thursday’s trading will have negative screen guidance after the natural gas contract fell 13.5 cents Wednesday amid overall energy futures that was spurred by further travails in the financial world (see related story).

Tropical Depression Sixteen was never more than a mild threat to Gulf of Mexico production, and became even less so after moving inland over northeastern Honduras Wednesday. Tropical Storm Omar became a hurricane but remained on track to pass through the northern Leeward Islands on its way into the central Atlantic.

The Southern California border and SoCal citygate made strong gains despite the wildfire-caused shutdown of its largest storage facility (see related story). The Aliso Canyon facility outage is costing SoCalGas 410 MMcf/d of injection capacity and 1.8 Bcf/d of withdrawal capacity.

The West had a couple of bullish developments to aid its overall advance. Questar’s Clay Basin storage facility was open to injections again after being down about a week for testing, and El Paso reported that previously high linepack had returned to normal throughout its system.

A cooling trend in the Midwest failed to boost most regional citygates, but did help support strong gains in the Midcontinent, where temperatures also were fairly chilly. Northeast citygates also were slightly softer in most cases as overnight New England lows in the 40s are not resulting in a burst of heating load.

Southern weather is staying moderately warm with highs in the low to mid 80s in much of the region. However, some of its northerly locations such as Little Rock, AR, Memphis, TN, and Nashville, TN, are cooling off to peak temperatures in the low 70s Thursday.

“Everybody is afraid of what’s going to happen,” said a Gulf Coast trader of Wednesday’s big stock market plunges. Despite those concerns, she reported finding “plenty of market” and having no problems in making gas sales. However, she said, her company mostly serves customers in the South and isn’t getting many calls to supply gas-fired peaking generation units.

The trader said she thought it was safe to assume that most points will be softer again Thursday.

Barclays Capital analysts said they expect an injection of 86 Bcf to be reported for the week ending Oct. 10, “reflecting little change in weather patterns and slower return of Gulf shut-ins.”

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