No movie was involved, but “The Big Chill” descended on the Northeast Tuesday and sent delivered prices in New England skyrocketing as high as $30. Outside the Northeast, the market was decidedly mixed around flatness with numbers ranging from a quarter down to half a dollar higher.

There was very heavy trading of all kinds — intraday, next-day and balance-of-week — in the Northeast, a regional trader said. He was kept busy late in the afternoon fielding requests for intraday supplies. The trader said he knew of at least one $35 deal getting done at the Algonquin citygate, was unsure of anything else higher than $22 at Dracut. Pipes to the Northeast “are really tight,” but for whatever reason none had found it necessary to declare an OFO as of Tuesday afternoon, he added.

A marketer said a New Hampshire customer told her that Northern Utilities Natural Gas had issued an OFO, so they were forced to go out and buy extra gas for compliance. (A spokesman for Bay State Gas, which serves Massachusetts, confirmed that OFOs had been declared by his LDC and by NiSource affiliate Northern Utilities, which serves New Hampshire and Maine.) Meanwhile, colder weather was returning to the Upper Midwest and northern Great Lakes area, but conditions there weren’t expected to get as bad as in the Northeast, the marketer said.

South Jersey Gas joined the list of utilities reporting new demand records (see related story).

“Everyone here is sending as much gas as possible to the Northeast,” said a Calgary-based producer. Area temperatures were staying above freezing, which helped free up more Alberta gas to send where they would pay handsomely for it. He noted that general basis for February was getting hammered before the screen plunged Tuesday, but contrary to other points, intra-Alberta basis actually strengthened a bit because of the Nymex weakness.

The Weather Channel’s web site had a long streaming of states where winter storm alerts had been declared: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

A Gulf Coast producer had this emphatic comment: “Dude, I don’t just mean it’s going to freeze [in the Northeast]; I mean it’s going to be FREEZING!” Citygates are already getting close to the $35-38 peaks in late February of 2003 (see Daily GPI, Feb. 26, 2003), he observed, “and Wednesday is not even going to be the coldest day of this freeze.”

The producer said his staffers were calling for a 150 Bcf withdrawal in Thursday’s storage report, “but I won’t be surprised if it’s more.”

A Texas-based marketer who primarily trades the Southwest and Midcontinent, obviously one of those who likes price volatility, said she wished her markets were seeing some of those quadruple-digit numbers like the ones that were rampant in the Northeast. “We don’t have that much market in the West, and comparatively it’s kind of dull,” she said. However, the marketer was moving much greater volumes than usual at the Southern California border, which she said was chiefly the result of storage plays. Late quotes tended to rise in the Permian Basin/Waha market, she said, but it was very difficult to find a home for Waha gas because Texas weather is still relatively mild. “I hope that front reaches us and we start to freeze,” which would raise the load level somewhere besides the Northeast, she said.

The marketer may get her wish granted in spades. According to previous forecasts, the mass of polar air that was just entering the Northeast and eastern parts of the Midwest on Tuesday will keep spreading into most of the U.S.

“Winter was certainly turned up a notch this past weekend, as the fiercest arctic blast since 1994 broke century-old records and became headline news,” the Weather 2000 consulting firm said in a Tuesday advisory. “Boston broke a daily low record set in 1875 on Saturday morning when readings hit -3°F, also the first time [zero] has been broken since January 1994. Syracuse, NY reached -16°F that morning, just one day after its high temperature only reached -2!”

Don’t look now, Weather 2000 continued, but “with last weekend’s arctic blast being the coldest in a decade, it may surprise many that this week’s arctic blast will easily be the coldest in two decades.”

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