Prices were flat to up a little more than 20 cents in most of the cash market Tuesday. The mild softness tended to congregate at Louisiana, Alabama/Mississippi and Northeast points. One source said storage buying must still be in vogue, because the physical market had support neither from a prior-day screen drop nor from weather that remains fairly mild outside a hot southern half of Texas and desert Southwest.

Whether the overall cash firmness can be sustained was very much in doubt. The natural gas screen ignored the strength of Nymex’s petroleum product offerings and tacked on an 11.5-cent decline Tuesday to Monday’s loss of just under 8 cents.

And weather-related demand will continue to be scarce. Most of the U.S. is experiencing May’s typical shoulder-month conditions, and stormy weather is tending to squelch a slow build-up of air conditioning load in much of the South. Western Canada is fairly chilly again (Calgary-area temperatures — both high and low — were in the 30s Tuesday), but on the other side of the country Toronto nearly reached 70 degrees.

Outside the mountainous sections of the West, highs are predicted to go no lower Wednesday than the 50s in New England and the Upper Plains/Upper Midwest.

Intrastate Texas suppliers are seeing some fairly significant air conditioning load develop as highs are expected to hit the low 90s Wednesday in Houston and San Antonio. Nearly all points in the Lone Star state saw gains of about a nickel or more Tuesday. However, North Texas and the Midcontinent are in cooldown modes. The Dallas-Fort Worth area’s high in the low 90s Tuesday will yield to the mid 80s Wednesday, while Oklahoma City is expected to go from the low 80s Tuesday to the low to mid 70s Wednesday.

The Southern California border tightened its deficit to the PG&E citygate to about a quarter. As recently as last Friday the spread had been 85 cents.

A new data service, “U.S. Natural Gas Hub Flows,” has debuted on the NGI website (https://intelligencepress.com/features/bentek/). Bentek Energy uses analysis of the evening nomination cycles for various market locations on the day prior to actual flow to chart changes in flow volumes and the price spread of each location from the prevailing Henry Hub price. For instance, as of Tuesday Transco Zone 6-New York City’s month-to-date average volume was running at 1,504,000 MMBtu/d — up 172,000 MMBtu/d from the same period last year. But in the production area, Transco Station 65’s average volume of 2,443,000 MMBtu/d through Tuesday was down 35,000 MMBtu/d from the comparable period in 2005. The spread from Tuesday’s $6.54 Henry Hub average was plus 56 cents and plus 12 cents for each point respectively.

“There’s too much gas on the market,” proclaimed a Midcontinent producer who wondered when prices were going to respond appropriately. Tuesday obviously wasn’t the day, he said, noting the upticks at most points. He said his company was able to take advantage of west-to-east spreads, taking Rockies supplies to the Midcontinent/Midwest and Midcontinent gas to the East Coast.

There’s still some storage buying going on, the producer noted, but that demand is likely to get pinched pretty hard in another couple of months as customers start to fill their accounts long before the traditional injection season is over. Of course, serious summer heating load will have kicked in by then, he said, but the question is whether there will be enough heat to absorb the excess supplies that no longer have storage as an option. He observed that Midcontinent weather is cooling off quite a bit, which will show up in reduced gas burns for air conditioning power generation.

The National Weather Service (NWS) forecast for the May 15-19 workweek breaks down into a warm West and a cool East. Except for normal conditions in upper New England and the southern end of the Florida peninsula, the agency calls for below normal temperatures everywhere east of a line starting in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and curving northwestward through the Texas Panhandle before turning vertical along the western end of the Oklahoma Panhandle and western border of Kansas, then curving back to the northeast through western Nebraska, central South Dakota, the southeast corner of North Dakota and the northwest corner of Minnesota. NWS predicts above normal temperatures everywhere west of a line descending vertically south from eastern Montana to eastern New Mexico and the western tip of Texas.

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