Spot prices soared as high as $16 Monday at Transco Zone 6-New York City as triple-digit spikes at Northeast citygates were way out in front of strong gains across the board. The weekend blast of cold across the Midwest and Northeast is proving to have more staying power and be more severe than forecasts had indicated late last week. The cash market also had support from last Friday’s 19.9-cent advance by March futures and the return of industrial load from weekend hiatus.

All seven Northeast citygate points averaged well above $10 in leading Monday’s upward charge. Upticks ranged from about 15 cents to a little more than $4. Although Transco Zone 6-NYC garnered the top quote, Iroquois Zone 2 recorded both the highest average and biggest gain.

Actually, temperatures will be rising a bit Tuesday at quite a few locations, but that will still include lows in the teens and 20s in the Northeast and Midwest. Despite its huge price increases, New York City will not be getting any lower than 36 degrees Tuesday after bottoming out around 21 Monday, according to Madison, WI-based Weather Central.

Frozen precipitation will play its part in enhancing heating load in the northern market areas. Snow, sleet and freezing rain will reach from the lower Midwest into the Northeast Tuesday, The Weather Channel (TWC) said.

Although some areas of the South will see lows in the 30s Tuesday, the region will continue to experience early spring-like conditions with highs in the 50s, 60s and even 70s. Orlando’s forecast of a 75-degree high Tuesday was a factor in the Florida citygate seeing Monday’s smallest advance.

Freezing highs will continue in the Rockies, but some parts of the desert Southwest will see temperatures get into the 80s, TWC said.

One reason for the hyperstrength of Northeast prices Monday almost certainly was traders buying new gas to make up for overtakes Sunday that created imbalances. Transco confirmed that predictions of more moderate weather early this week had been misleading as it warned Monday of a potential OFO in Zone 6, saying it had experienced a significant decrease in operational flexibility there “as a result of below-normal temperatures [that] were much colder than forecast.” The decrease in flexibility “was exacerbated by shippers’ nonratable takes and use of due-to-shipper imbalance activity” Sunday, Transco said.

And affiliated pipelines Texas Eastern and Algonquin reported experiencing lower than desired linepack levels Monday, which both attributed primarily to customers’ “excessive hourly takes” during the last 12 hours of Sunday’s gas day.

Northern Natural Gas indicated that the Upper Midwest will get a warm-up Wednesday but then return immediately to single-digit temperatures. A bulletin board posting noted that Northern’s normal system-weighted temperature at this time of year is 21 degrees, and it projected these averages: 4 Monday and 9 Tuesday, then jumping to 18 Wednesday before returning to 9 Thursday.

Columbia Gulf was able to reactivate the third line through the Hartsville (TN) Compressor Station Friday evening as expected, spokesman Kelly Merritt said. The station was destroyed in a fiery explosion touched off by a tornado last Tuesday night. Current capacity, which depends on limits at the Delhi Constraint Point in northeast Louisiana, is 1.4 million Dth/d, he added. Columbia Gulf is considering bringing in temporary compression to the Hartsville location, he said, adding that there was nothing new to report in the pipeline’s investigation of the incident.

Observing that her city had a below-zero wind chill factor Monday morning, a marketer in the Upper Midwest said her Consumers Energy delivered price had climbed nearly half a dollar from Friday. She noted that temperatures will be moving up Tuesday in Midwest but will remain below freezing. In fact, it may not get above freezing in Michigan before Friday, she said. On a personal note, the marketer said it “seems like I’ve shoveled more snow this winter than ever before in my life.”

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