With freezing overnight lows having settled themselves into the Midwest and Northeast at least temporarily and even some Southern cities dipping into the 30s, most points were able to rebound Monday from the previous Friday’s across the board losses.

But the old Rockies bugaboos of producing more gas than outgoing pipes can handle and having limited storage options came back to bite the regional market once again. All Rockies points fell hard, with four seeing triple-digit declines, and sub-dollar quotes dipped as low as 50 cents at Opal.

Nearly all gains were in double digits in ranging from about a nickel to nearly 85 cents. Westcoast Station 2 in Western Canada and Kingsgate in the Pacific Northwest joined the Rockies in recording losses from a little less than a nickel to around $2.70.

December futures, which offered negative guidance to Monday’s cash market with a 21.9-cent drop Friday, got even more bearish Monday, extending their dive by another 41.9 cents.

Western markets, which had to deal with the double whammy of high-linepack OFOs Saturday by California’s two biggest distributors, will have none in effect for Tuesday. SoCalGas ended its OFO Sunday, and as a result the Southern California border was Monday’s biggest gainer. San Juan Basin was close behind, with new border demand supplemented by high temperatures returning to about 90 degrees in the desert Southwest.

However, PG&E extended its OFO through Monday before lifting it for Tuesday. The length of the OFO had a somewhat suppressant effect on Malin and the PG&E citygate, both of which rose less than a dime.

Although Rockies transport constraints had dwindled to virtually nothing late last week, they are cropping up again. Cheyenne Plains will lower its Cheyenne Plains West constraint point to 300 MMcf/d Tuesday (see Transportation Notes) due to an emergency shutdown test for part of the day in preparation for trying to restore its system to the approximately 780 MMcf/d of flows that prevailed before a mid-September compressor station fire. Cheyenne Plains expects to return to 590 MMcf/d of capacity Wednesday.

Other factors were at work in the Rockies. El Paso warned that it might have to declare a Pack Strained Operating Conditions due to excess linepack and storage injections being at maximum, while Northeast reported that shippers were overnominating at Kemmerer Compressor Station over the weekend, and it has only about 10-14 days worth of storage-shifting ability left to accommodate the excess before having to resort to OFOs (see Transportation Notes).

A Gulf Coast producer trading representative thought Monday’s continued screen dive was too much for the cash market to overcome, and as a result she expects lower physical prices Tuesday. She was actually surprised that cash didn’t also go down Monday, noting that the industry officially has record storage levels now and there “just doesn’t seem to be that much heating load.”

Yes, the trader allowed, temperatures are getting down to freezing or lower at night in the northern market areas, “but when they get back up into the 50s during the day,” as is the case in much of the Northeast right now, the overall price-boosting effect shouldn’t be as much as it was Monday. However, she said her company was “not having any problems finding buyers.”

Noting that it had to have been storage withdrawals that were helping depress cash prices late last week, she suspected that the people who were withdrawing then likely looked at Friday’s across the board price plunges and realized that they had created some usable injection space and could buy cheaper gas Monday than last week.

Although the National Weather Service (NWS) had a rather bullish outlook for below-normal temperatures in most of the eastern U.S. for the Nov. 5-9 workweek (see Daily GPI, Oct. 31), the picture was greatly changed in its six- to 10-day forecast posted Monday. Outside normal conditions in the Florida peninsula and in the Pacific Northwest (including the northern end of California), NWS predicts above-normal readings throughout the rest of the Lower 48 states in the first half of next week. Alaska is the only area where it expects below-normal temperatures.

After mostly dropping in recent weeks, the Baker Hughes Rotary Rig Count (https://intelligencepress.com/features/bakerhughes/) found a sizeable increase of 27 in the number of drilling rigs searching for gas in the U.S. during the week ended Nov. 2. The Gulf of Mexico added five rigs while the onshore tally rose by 22, Baker Hughes said. Its count was 2% higher than a month ago and up 1% from the year-earlier level.

Commenting on the rise in active gas-seeking rigs, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey/The Gerdes Group said, “While the rig count returned to roughly its mid-September level, we do not expect the survey to rise to its late August high of over 1,520 rigs on a sustained basis anytime soon. Gulf of Mexico rigs rose [five] to 56 rigs, but limited improvement is expected here as well, as anecdotal reports suggests less than 65 rigs may be actively marketing in the Gulf at present.”

Although it had virtually no significance to the gas market, former Hurricane Noel is officially ranked as the deadliest storm of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season, having killed at least 120 people, mainly due to flooding and mudslides in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, according to The Weather Channel. Noel’s remnants pounded eastern New England Saturday before moving onward over eastern Canada.

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