Uniform price movement nearly returned to the spot market Thursday. Only flat quotes for NGPL Amarillo Mainline and Cheyenne Hub kept all points from recording declines. Modest warming trends in the South and Northeast combined with the fact that Thursday’s trading covered the weekend through Monday — with the accompanying decline of industrial load — to induce the overall softness.

One source also suggested that the decline of cash trading liquidity associated with holiday absences from the office likely meant many utilities and end-users were leaning more heavily on storage withdrawals to meet their loads.

Losses ranging from a couple of pennies to nearly 55 cents were largest at Northeast citygates, where Friday’s highs were expected to be in the 40s and sub-freezing lows would be scarce. The smallest drops were concentrated in the Midcontinent and West, where frigid weather remained in the forecast.

Snowy weather is forecast to continue dominating the intermountain West Friday but also will be sending its elements racing toward the Midwest and eventually the Northeast by Saturday. The South, which will enjoy a relatively balmy late-December Friday, will be invaded by a cold front late Friday into Saturday, The Weather Channel said. Until then, though, Southern highs were predicted to be mostly in the mid 60s to low 70s Friday, with Orlando, FL, expected to reach 80.

After spending most of its expiration day in negative territory, the January futures contract managed a late recovery to close with a 12.6-cent increase to $7.172. Henry Hub’s decline of about 15 cents meant that instead of a convergence attempt, cash quotes and the screen instead widened their gap to more than 35 cents.

In an advisory titled “Winter lessons to be gleaned from December weather,” the Weather 2000 consulting firm noted that the area from South Texas to North Carolina has experienced one of the warmest Decembers in several years. Conversely, the Upper Midwest to New England experienced the coldest December since the “infamous” month in 2000. Boston is 1 inch away from its snowiest December ever, Weather 2000 said.

The company has a somewhat bullish near-term forecast, saying that when polar air “does occasionally reach the warm South, as it will next week, the shock value will be all the greater. This includes dramatic hard freezes, especially for drought-inflicted areas, so agrarian interests should keep their guard up despite the overall mild winter.” However, Weather 2000 cautioned, arctic air “is finite, so when you have expended more cold air than you have this entire decade (as we have), the atmosphere and Canadian stores need time to rebuild these air masses. This would take the form of a temporarily more relaxed or zonal pattern, as we’re likely to see during the [second] week of January after the most frigid air of the season yet pours down during the [first] week of January.”

Although it didn’t seem a significant problem, El Paso said Thursday it had reset to “moderate” the probability of declaring a Strained Operating Condition or Critical Operating Condition due to low linepack. Other than sections of the Transco system where IT remained unavailable, transportation constraints currently are minimal in nearly all cases.

A Gulf Coast producer said he expects to see a flurry of early activity Friday with not many traders available and those who do work leaving early for the New Year’s Day weekend. Noting that the transition to January during the long weekend means Friday’s deals will be for Tuesday-Wednesday flows next week, he said it’s mainly utilities that will have the problem of projecting their load out four or five days in advance. Suppliers such as his company only need to fill whatever orders they receive, he said.

The producer’s company still had a few bidweek “stragglers” to take care of but would finish them Thursday afternoon, he said. He expects very light January trading Friday, although some people may be doing “a little bit of fixed prices,” he added. Actually, the bulk of January baseload deals got done before the Christmas weekend, he said, “which made it a weird bidweek.”

The producer reported doing nearly all index deals Thursday, saying the Northeast market area and Columbia Gas in Appalachia were fetching small premiums of index plus 0.25-0.5 cent. He also said he sold into Columbia Gulf mainline at basis of minus 2 cents. Basis tended to get stronger as bidweek progressed, he said.

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