Natural gas futures probed both sides of even early Thursday as market participants prepared to assess early winter balances without the usual true-up provided by weekly government inventory data.

After probing as low as $3.055/MMBtu earlier in the morning, the December Nymex contract had rebounded to $3.142 as of 8:35 a.m. ET, up 3.6 cents. The front month shed 40.9 cents over the previous three sessions.

Because of a planned systems upgrade, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) will not release its usual natural gas storage report this week, leaving market participants guessing as to the net inventory impacts of balances during the period ending Nov. 3.

EIA said it will continue collecting data and release two weeks of statistics when it resumes its normal...