A majority of points were moderately softer Wednesday, although quite a few others were flat to as much as about a nickel higher. An impending decline in power generation load as cooler weather returns to the Midwest and Northeast starting Thursday were cited as the primary cause of declines ranging from 2-3 cents to nearly 20 cents. Most of the dips were in single digits.

Even the South will see some erosion of air conditioning demand as a cold front moves into North Carolina and Tennessee Thursday, according to The Weather Channel. Meanwhile, the cold weather that has inhabited the upper Rockies and High Plains regions recently will be winding down, it added.

There were no problems from a trading perspective caused by a pipeline rupture in southwest Oklahoma that caused the shut-in of about 190 MMcf/d, a Midcontinent marketer said. ANR wasn’t sure Wednesday if its line or another in the immediate vicinity was the one that ruptured, but there was “a very good possibility that it is a third-party line,” a spokesman said (see related story).

“Enough other supplies go in and out of the rupture area that traders just shift them around an outage,” the marketer said. Also, ANR was keeping gas deliveries whole for an undetermined period.

It mostly depends on how much electric generation load is sustained whether prices will go up or down Thursday, the marketer continued, noting that a 1.1-cent screen decline Wednesday provided little guidance for cash numbers. Since the Midwest and to some extent the Midcontinent are supposed to be retreating from a brief taste of near-summer temperatures by Friday, softer quotes seem more likely, he concluded.

A Gulf Coast producer reported seeing the gas-fired generation that got launched when the weather got hotter keep going, but hadn’t detected any appreciable increase since then. One peaking power plant that her company supplies is running much earlier than it usually does as the summer approaches, she said.

A producer who trades the Northeast said regional citygates started out approximately flat to Tuesday but softened later. There wasn’t much demand for delivered gas, he said, noting that “even some of the utilities were selling” off their baseload supplies, which is a definite sign of a soft market. A lot of nuclear plants in the area are down for refueling and maintenance, he said, but with low power demand from high temperatures in the 60s, most Northeast generators don’t need to fire up their gas-fueled facilities.

One source said he assumed that natural gas futures were a little softer Wednesday chiefly due to the weakness in Nymex’s oil product trading pits. Crude oil for June delivery plunged more than a dollar and a half to $50.45/bbl after bearish inventory reports came out. He thought it kind of odd that the American Petroleum Institute (API) and Department of Energy (DOE) would be so radically opposed on supply changes, saying, “You’d think that they would tend to come up with approximately the same numbers.” He said the oil futures market apparently was placing more faith in DOE’s estimate of crude stockpiles rising 2.7 million bbl last week instead of API’s reported decline of 6.1 million bbl.

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