Just when it appeared that this week’s general relief from the previous week’s heat wave and a weak screen would preclude any cash market rallies, a moderate one showed up Tuesday at a majority of eastern points. Although peak temperatures are staying seasonal to even cool in some cases in most northern market areas, highs in the 90s and 100s are growing common again across the southern half of the nation.

With a few flat to slightly lower numbers in the mix, prices rose by anywhere from a couple of pennies to a little more than 35 cents in the East. The Midcontinent and Midwest citygates tended to see most of the largest gains.

On the other hand, the West included a few flat to about 20 cents higher points among losses that ran as high as about 55 cents in the Rockies/Pacific Northwest and California markets, where nearly 1.2 Bcf/d of supply would become available again Wednesday following Tuesday’s one-day shutdown of the Opal Plant in Wyoming.

Although it had negative guidance from Monday’s screen loss of 33.9 cents, the cash market will get some support Wednesday from the September futures contract after it recovered about a quarter.

The heat never really went away in some areas. As the Weather 2000 consulting firm noted in an advisory Tuesday, the Dallas area had “just finished rattling off another streak” of nine consecutive days topping 100 degrees.

It’s “not so bad where we are” with highs getting to only the low 90s, said a utility buyer in the Lower Midwest, but she added there must be more heat than that in the Midcontinent and other parts of the Lower Midwest. Luckily her company didn’t have to deal with Tuesday higher prices in the region because it’s not buying daily gas, being covered by summer term contracts and what it picked up in bidweek. The utility probably won’t need any new daily supplies this month unless a really hot period returns for several days and drives up power generation load behind its system, she said.

Anecdotal data should keep traders from being surprised again if the Energy Information Administration reports a second highly unusual midsummer storage withdrawal in its report for the week ending Aug. 4, as some analysts are suggesting. In addition to the record-setting power generation demand during much of the week from a nationwide heat wave, Southern Natural Gas said Tuesday that as of Aug. 3 the working gas inventory in its two storage facilities stood at 46.6 Bcf, or 78% of total capacity. As of July 27 the volume was 48.0 Bcf, or 80% of capacity, the pipeline said. Southern noted that although it had “seen some improvement in the rate at which storage is being filled, the current level of working inventory is still well above last year’s levels…” Southern added that it will continue to evaluate when it will be feasible to lift the restrictions on nonfirm storage injections that it implemented in a May 24 posting (see Daily GPI, May 25).

At least in the West, there is evidence that withdrawals are continuing this week in response to Tuesday’s shutdown of the Opal Plant. El Paso told shippers Tuesday it may need to declare a Strained Operating Condition because of overtakes exceeding receipts drawing 140 MMcf from its system linepack in the previous 24 hours and forcing its storage facility into maximum withdrawals (see Transportation Notes).

And analysis of flows at 14 market trading hubs by Bentek Energy (https://intelligencepress.com/features/bentek/) shows that the Southern California border, where volumes had soared on Monday in preparation for the outage, plummeted by 464,000 MMBtu/d in nominations for Tuesday. That was undoubtedly due to people making withdrawals from SoCalGas and PG&E storage to make up for production-area gas that couldn’t be delivered at the border that day, one source said.

Bentek also found that the Opal outage actually took nearly 1.2 Bcf out of western markets Tuesday. Opal volumes went to zero, a reduction of 1,196,000 MMBtu/d from the day before, the consulting firm said. A spokesman for plant operator Williams Field Services confirmed that thanks to recent and ongoing expansion work, cryogenic processing capacity of the Opal Plant has increased to between 1.1 Bcf/d and 1.2 Bcf/d. The facility has been “running full” most of the time in recent weeks, he added.

The National Weather Service expects above normal temperatures during the Aug. 14-18 workweek in a broad swath of the central U.S. from the Upper Midwest (along with western New York and Pennsylvania) through the eastern Midcontinent and western Southweast into western Mississippi, all of Louisiana and the eastern two-thirds of Texas. It also predicts above normal readings for all of California, southwest Oregon, most of Nevada and the eastern edge of Arizona. Below normal temperatures are due from the southeast corner of Virginia through the eastern Carolinas into southeast Georgia, and in most of New Mexico and Colorado, the agency said.

The Atlantic Basin scene remains quiet. A tropical low a little more than 800 miles east of the Windward Islands continues to move westward with no additional development, The Weather Channel said. And to the northwest, a tropical wave was producing pockets of heavy rain over the Bahamas strong upper-level winds made it unlikely that this wave would develop further, the forecaster said.

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