The weather continued to range Thursday from memories of winter in Canada and the northern third of the U.S. to hints of summer across the South and Southwest, with the territory in between serving as a buffer with varying but mostly spring-like conditions. The cash market tended to reflect such fundamentals, ranging within a dime up or down from flat in most cases, but with the positive moves outweighing the negative ones.

Parts of the West again wrestled with non-weather considerations. San Juan Basin quotes rallied substantially from Wednesday’s plunge in what one source called “getting back to reality.” But the transportation constraints on Rockies gas remained real enough, and prices there continued to wallow in sub-$2 pricing.

“Yesterday [Wednesday] San Juan prices started too low but rose to end about where today’s [Thursday] prices were,” a western marketer explained. People thought the basin’s maintenance issues, primarily the five-day outage of Transwesern San Juan Lateral, were going to be a bigger deal than they really were, he said. The constraints actually are affecting El Paso’s Bondad pool a lot more than Blanco, “and some traders were just realizing that” late Wednesday and Thursday, the marketer added.

Rockies pipes are having to contend not only with denial of a major outlet for their production but also a lack of weather load, he continued. The region was getting cooler Thursday, but didn’t have any cold of much subtance in the forecast, he said. “I hate muddling through all these April maintenance hassles; they always happen about this time,” the marketer sighed. “So I’m telling my wife that next April we’re going on vacation then.”

A Calgary-based trader noted that it was “cold and blowing snow” in the area, which was boosting intra-Alberta numbers following Wednesday’s mild softness. The Rockies softness caused the Sumas-domestic spread to get even wider on Northwest, he added.

The EIA report of 37 Bcf in storage injections last week was “a little higher than we expected,” a Houston-based source commented, but he didn’t see it as having much effect on the cash market, saying it likely had already been accounted for in advance. For Gulf Coast traders that like volatility, it’s been a pretty boring week since the opening softness Monday, he added. Movement probably will pick up a bit in the downward direction Friday, he said, citing the trends toward moderating weather, Thursday’s screen drop of nearly 15 cents and the typical slump of industrial demand over a weekend. Other traders concurred for the same reasons.

Northern Natural’s demarc and Ventura points saw some of the rare eastern gains of more than a dime. Their strength was no surprise, a Midcontinent marketer said, since the pipeline’s market area in the Upper Plains and Upper Midwest state’s is among the last remaining bastions of snowy and freezing weather.

A Florida utility buyer quoting citygates in the high $5.10s said state weather is “cool in the mornings and moderately warm in afternoons,” so air conditioning load remains on the low side. Florida Gas Transmission is curtailing some market-area deliveries due to compressor station maintenance, “but it’s not enough to affect prices” significantly, she said..

The National Weather Service has a mild outlook for next week. In its forecast for the April 8-12 period, the only below normal temperatures NWS sees will be on either side of the New Mexico-Ariozona border. A surrounding semicircle consisting of the western half of Texas, the southern halves of Colorado and Utah, the rest of Arizona and most of the West Coast are expected to be normal, NWS said. Above normal readings are predicted for the rest of the U.S.

Analyst Thomas Driscoll of Lehman Brothers estimates a storage injection of 20 Bcf for the week ending April 4.

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