As traders had predicted, a continuing drop in heating load resulted in falling prices across the board Friday. The losses ranged from a little more than a nickel to about 45 cents, with Northeast citygates taking the biggest hits.

Besides the moderating weather trends, prices also came under pressure from Thursday’s report of a 176 Bcf storage withdrawal during the previous week, one source said. While that was slightly above consensus expectations, it was deemed bearish because the volume fell so far short of the comparable year-earlier pull of 227 Bcf and thus increased the year-on-year surplus to 239 Bcf. And of course, the normal weekend drop in industrial load played a minor role in pushing prices lower, he added.

Expected Saturday highs of around 40 degrees or more from Boston to Chicago probably felt downright balmy to residents of the Northeast and Midwest who are used to rarely getting above freezing in the first half of February. And in the West, flooding from a storm in the desert Southwest supplanted low temperatures as the primary weather concern.

Interestingly, the state known for its winter warmth had a good deal of heating demand. Freeze warnings were in effect for early Saturday in parts of Florida as far south as the Everglades, according to The Weather Channel. But despite that and Florida Gas Transmission keeping an Overage Alert Day (OAD) notice in effect for its market area through at least Friday, state citygates and FGT production-area quotes joined in the overall price slide, with the citygate diving about 40 cents.

A utility buyer in northern Florida confirmed that his area had gotten down to the vicinity of freezing Thursday night and was expected to repeat the feat Friday night. However, he noted that the pipeline’s OAD was not terribly restrictive at a 25% imbalance tolerance.

Meanwhile, “it’s nice and warm up here,” remarked a producer based in Calgary, where Friday’s expected high was in the low 50s. He noted that Henry Hub and the Chicago citygate traded even with each other Friday after the Hub had been at a small premium in the previous couple of days. Chicago’s low numbers occurred early and rose later when more buyers emerged, he said, “which was kind of surprising considering the mild weekend forecasts.”

A Gulf Coast supply cut of about 100,000 Dth/d that had been scheduled for Feb. 10-14 did not materialize. Trunkline LNG said Friday it had postponed indefinitely pump maintenance at its terminal near Lake Charles, LA that would have limited maximum sendout to 900,000 Dth/d during that period (see Daily GPI, Feb. 4). The facility’s normal sendout capacity is 1,000,000 Dth/d.

The Texas intrastate market was taking an unscheduled outage of one of the South Texas Project’s nuclear reactors that began Wednesday afternoon in stride, as mild temperatures in the Lone Star State kept power demand low.

His “very initial” estimation for the upcoming storage report comes with a high degree of uncertainty, said Citigroup analyst Kyle Cooper. “Not only have recent reports been outside our range, the various models are also indicating wide disparities,” he continued. “While the midpoint of those early estimations is around a draw of 125 Bcf, our final estimation may vary from a 100 to 150 Bcf draw.”

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