The week’s market activity came to a quiet close Friday with prices at most eastern points and Permian/Waha hovering on either side of flat, but with a slight bias to the upside. Western markets were generally softer, with California once again way out in front, leading a downhill charge.

The relative firmness in the East was difficult to explain adequately, as both supply and demand fundamentals were weakening overall. A moderate heat wave in the Northeast was expected to be only a memory by Saturday, and weather in the Midwest remained fairly mild. “We’re having moderately warm days but cool nights, so there’s very little load overall,” said the fuel buyer for an East Coast electric utility in explanation of why he made no weekend gas purchases.

In addition, approximately 650 MMcf/d was returning to the Gulf Coast market Friday. Destin Pipeline said it was taking nominations again as a maintenance outage at the downstream Pascagoula (MS) Gas Plant was completed earlier than expected. The plant originally was scheduled to remain down through Saturday.

The market apparently decided to ignore what many had considered a very bearish storage injection report and the normal weekend drop in gas demand, according to one marketer. He didn’t consider Thursday afternoon’s small screen uptick, followed by futures flatness Friday morning, as having any significance to cash traders. Thus he was forced to assume that storage demand, plus “a little bit” of air conditioning load in the Southeast, was responsible for averting eastern price falls.

A customer-specific OFO by PG&E, in response to growing linepack, was a key reason for much of the western softness, a trader said. In addition, there were maintenance constraints on the utility’s Redwood and Baja Paths, she said.

An aggregator noted that California border-SoCalGas numbers continued to decline, “but they’re holding on to their price value much better than [border]-PG&E numbers.” May indexes had the two border points exactly $3 apart ($14.94 vs. $11.94), but now the spread has widened to more than $4.50, he said, adding, “I guess it’s because there’s room for a lot more storage demand on the SoCal system.”

Snow had turned to rain Friday in Denver, according to a marketer, and the snow that the city got in the previous two days “disappeared almost immediately because it was so warm before the snow started.”

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