The cash market got mugged Friday as little weather-related load, a bearish storage report, prior-day energy futures weakness and lower weekend demand from industrial end-users ganged up on prices. Double-digit losses were unusually consistent across all geographic market areas, ranging from about 20 cents to about 35 cents.

The homogenous nature of Friday’s softness was even more remarkable to one source, who had expected western numbers to hold up more strongly than in other regions because of stormy cold fronts that would be sweeping through the West from Friday through the weekend, before eventually heading into the eastern U.S. Otherwise the moderate weather conditions that were a major depressant to Friday’s prices would continue in most of the nation.

However, “a strong cold front and bullish area of Canadian high pressure” was due to be occupying the Northeast Monday and Tuesday, according to The Weather Channel (TWC). “Daytime highs will be reduced to the 40s across New York, New England and the mountains of Pennsylvania by Tuesday with 30s in northern Maine,” TWC said.

Through Thursday swing prices had maintained fairly significant premiums to first-of-month indexes, but Friday’s drops carried a majority of points to discounted levels. Only the Rockies/Pacific Northwest, Western Canada, Southwest basins and most Midcontinent pipes were still consistently at premiums to index Friday.

A potentially large supply shortfall in the Rockies was averted when the Opal Plant in Wyoming was able to resume operations early Friday after an emergency shutdown occurred late Thursday afternoon due to a power outage (see Transportation Notes). The plant normally processes close to 1 Bcf/d.

A representative of the Jonah Gathering System, which provides most, if not all, of Opal supplies, said Jonah Field producers were flowing “over rate” (that is, more than they normally would) after the outage ended in order to try to make up for the plant’s downtime. The supplies were definitely needed, as Kern River said linepack in its furthest upstream segment was running low as a result of the outage.

A Calgary-based producer said he was perplexed by the recent strength of Westcoast Station 2 quotes. “I have no clue as to why,” he said, noting that Alliance has been providing only 5% Authorized Overrun Service instead of its usual 20%, “so you’d expect there to be more supply available in BC [British Columbia].” He said price spreads were barely covering the variable costs of moving gas from Aeco to Malin, so it was not a very attractive trade Friday.

Normally a further dime-plus drop on the natural gas screen, coupled with more declines by Nymex’s petroleum product offerings, would indicate continuing cash softness Monday. But the producer commented, “You never know” if such conventional wisdom proves viable.

A strong sign of why Midwest prices were weak came from the Northern Natural Gas bulletin board. Its normal system weighted temperature at this time of year is 43 degrees, the pipeline said. But it was projecting these average system temperatures: 57 degrees Friday, 61 Saturday, 60 Sunday and 52 Monday.

Production-area Transwestern prices could be depressed Monday while Southern California border numbers are simultaneously enhanced by a full-gas-day shutdown Tuesday of Transwestern’s North Needles interconnect with the SoCalGas system (see Transportation Notes). A scheduler for a marketing firm observed that Transwestern also has a Topock interconnect with SoCalGas, “but we can’t get through to it” because no capacity is available there. However, a western trader thought the outage probably would make Transwestern prices lower Monday than they otherwise would be, but she didn’t expect them to crash. People are aware of the North Needles outage Tuesday and will have already planned around it, she said.

Transwestern was planning to do a valve replacement later this year on its side of the border that would have required shutting in North Needles, a spokesman said, so since the interconnect will be unavailable anyway Tuesday, Transwestern is moving its project up to that day. He was unaware of the availability of capacity at the Topock interconnect, but noted dryly that “undoubtedly the Topock interconnect will be full on the day North Needles is out.”

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