Finding only relatively moderate cooling load for mid-August in many areas and weighed down slightly by the previous Friday’s near-nickel futures drop, nearly all of the cash market followed up Friday’s gains with softening Monday.

An ongoing lack of any credible tropical storm threat to offshore production was a minor bearish factor, while industrial load’s return from its usual weekend decline apparently was not of interest to cash traders.

Flat numbers at three western points were the exceptions to overall downturns ranging from 2-3 cents to a little more than 15 cents. Most of those in double digits were in the Gulf Coast, Midcontinent/Midwest and Northeast.

After slipping by 4.8 cents going into the weekend, September futures provided further modestly negative guidance to Tuesday’s cash market by falling another 3.6 cents Monday (see related story).

Tropical Depression Six, which was designated late Friday afternoon, became Tropical Storm (TS) Franklin before disappearing into the North Atlantic over the weekend. Successor TS Gert was moving northward in the mid-Atlantic Monday morning and expected to past just east of Bermuda later in the day before gradually veering to the northeast. Gert was virtually certain to be another nonevent for the gas market. The National Hurricane Center was according development odds Monday morning of 10% and near-zero, respectively, to a tropical wave about 325 miles east of the Lesser Antilles and a broad low-pressure area about 650 miles north of the northern Leeward Islands. However, by early that afternoon the low-pressure area had dissipated while the tropical wave had its chances of becoming a tropical cyclone within the succeeding 48 hours upgraded to 20%.

The Weather 2000 consulting firm noted the last time the Atlantic season commenced with the first six tropical storms all failing to become hurricanes was 2002. If Gert remains only a tropical storm, which is quite likely, the “0-7 streak” would be unprecedented in hurricane season recorded history, Weather 2000 said.

And Citi Futures Perspective analyst Tim Evans weighed in with the observation that the recent pickup in Atlantic tropical activity is consistent with several forecasts of an active season overall, “but so far it has been tropical storms, not hurricanes, and with more activity in the Atlantic than the Gulf of Mexico. Production losses season to date are only on the order of 1.0 Bcf from Tropical Storm Don.”

Only Texas and Oklahoma, along with much of the desert Southwest, still have peak temperatures in the 100 area these days. Even the South is strangely subdued for what is usually the hottest month of the year, with highs limited to the upper 80s through the mid 90s Tuesday and few locations outside Florida getting any hotter than the lower 90s.

Otherwise, except for some Rocky Mountain highs reaching the 90 area, fairly mild peaks from around 70 to the mid 80s dominate the rest of the weather outlook from New England and Eastern Canada all the way to the U.S. West Coast and Western Canada.

After Henry Hub traded at an 11-cent premium to prompt-month futures Friday, the Hub’s decline of a little more than dime Monday trimmed the gap to about 2-3 cents. Similarly, while CIG’s discount to the Hub had been 28 cents going into the weekend, the larger Henry drop reduced their spread to about a quarter Monday.

Bison Pipeline had nothing new to report in a Monday update on its force majeure-related partial outage. It had already announced that in-line inspections scheduled for completion last Friday had been extended through Monday, and capacity available to shippers will remain limited to 230,000 Dth/d until further notices.

After Florida Gas Transmission and Southwest Gas ended restrictions on positive imbalances over the weekend (see Transportation Notes), and Tennessee followed suit late Monday afternoon by lifting an ongoing Imbalance Warning in downstream Zones 5 and 6, there were no remaining pipeline constraints of much significance.

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