Still finding only marginal heating or cooling load in various areas, most of the cash market was still able to realize small gains Monday on the basis of a 27.4-cent spike in June futures on the preceding Friday and the return of industrial load from its typical weekend decline. However, major transportation constraints in the West resulted in a combination of big gains and big losses in the region.

Most points ranged from flat to up a little more than $1.05. All increases of more than about 20 cents were in the Permian Basin/Waha, delivered desert Southwest and Southern California border markets. The minority losses were as small as about a nickel but ran as high as about $2.90 in El Paso’s San Juan-Blanco pool.

Tuesday’s cash market will have negative screen guidance after the June natural gas contract took back most of Friday’s increase by falling 23.6 cents amid substantial weakness in Nymex’s petroleum product offerings (see related story).

With much of the Deep South due to reach the 80s Tuesday, there was a fair amount of cooling demand for gas. However, although similar peak temperatures are predicted in the desert Southwest, that represents a cooling off. The Phoenix high around 95 Monday will be about 10 degrees lower Tuesday, according to Weather Central.

A cold front is forecast for the Midwest Tuesday, but temperatures as cold as the 30s are expected only near the Canadian border, while much of the region will top off in the comfortable 70s. Northeast highs will be cool to mild for the most part, The Weather Channel said. It added that mountain-area snows are due in parts of the Rockies, but otherwise most of the West will range from cool to warm.

With SoCalGas having ended a weekend high-linepack OFO and significant tightness of delivery capacity at the Southern California border due this week, border numbers recorded Monday’s biggest upticks of more than a dollar.

Florida Gas Transmission’s lifting of an Overage Alert Day Sunday had the opposite market effect, with the Florida citygate and Florida Gas Zone 3 dropping nearly 35 cents and about a dime, respectively.

“Whenever you see Rockies prices take a hit like they did today, it’s nearly always due to the pipeline situation,” said a producer in the region. He cited a list of maintenance projects that El Paso is performing this week, the most significant of which was a two-day shutdown of the Topock Line starting Tuesday that will reduce Southern California border deliveries by 278 MMcf/d. “No doubt this is having an impact on Rockies prices, especially in the San Juan Basin, where prices are down almost $3.” The producer also noted that a 200 MMcf/d reduction in Kern River capacity began Monday and is scheduled to last through May 23. He added that Questar also has maintenance work going on, “but they don’t disclose how much capacity it’s affecting.”

Some of the maintenance will take place in Texas, “but anything in New Mexico and Arizona can cause gas to back up in the Rockies, San Juan Basin especially,” the producer said.

“This kind of work takes place every spring and usually causes some scary drops in prices, as there’s just not much regional gas demand at this time of year,” he continued. “Probably not a good time of year to have hedges come off in the Rockies. The situation should improve when the maintenance work is completed, and REX [Rockies Express Pipeline] finally goes live into Missouri.”

It looks like most of the big capacity losses on El Paso will be restored before the end of the month, the producer said. “If REX is into Missouri by then, this basis blowout we’re experiencing at the moment could be short-lived.”

Speaking of REX, in a Monday update the pipeline said full REX-West service to Missouri is now expected “no sooner than the end of this week.” At the end of last week the expectation for full service had been “on or around May 13.”

The producer was concentrating on the El Paso, Kern River and Questar restrictions. However, trumping those for impact were four days of upcoming Transwestern maintenance. On Tuesday and Wednesday there will be an outage of the pipeline’s Blanco Hub that will reduce capacity between the hub and Bloomfield Compressor Capacity from 1,235,000 MMBtu/d to zero. Then on Thursday and Friday Transwestern will have its San Juan Lateral down for maintenance that will take capacity from Bloomfield to the pipeline’s Thoreau segment from 1,320,000 MMBtu/d to zero.

Ron Denhardt of Strategic Energy & Economic Research looks for a storage injection of 85 Bcf to be reported for the week ending May 9.

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