A large majority of points softened Monday as significant heating load was generally scarce and winter term deals along with sparse use of storage were able to meet many buyers’ needs.

Several scattered instances of flat to a couple of pennies higher quotes, most of them in California, were left out of losses ranging from 2-3 cents to about 45 cents. Cool conditions in the Northeast, which were in great contrast to the devastating nor’easter snowstorm that descended on the region during the Oct. 29-30 weekend, caused most of the largest drops to be concentrated there. Algonquin citygates recorded the top decline as Boston-area temperatures are expected to peak in the low to mid 60s Tuesday.

Transco Zone 1 was something of a market outlier in racking up an increase of a little more than 15 cents after a maintenance outage that had restricted flows from South Texas ended (see Transportation Notes).

The recent and impending additions of takeaway capacity from the Marcellus Shale continue to have a salutary effect on prices into Line 300 in Tennessee’s Zone 4. The Line 300 average in the mid $3.40s Monday was only about a nickel less than Line 200 numbers.

Following Friday’s essentially neutral futures guidance for Monday’s cash market, Nymex traders followed up with a negative signal by pushing the prompt-month contract 8.7 cents lower (see related story).

The National Hurricane Center upgraded the chances of a nontropical low-pressure system about 425 miles southwest of Bermuda becoming a subtropical cyclone within 48 hours from 40% to 60% during the day Monday. However, it was not expected to reach the East Coast as it moved slowly westward Monday with a turn to the northwest anticipated Tuesday.

Highs in the 60s and 70s were due to dominate Tuesday’s climate in the South, Northeast, Midwest and Southwest northward along the West Coast through California. The Pacific Northwest and Eastern Canada were forecast to experience modestly chillier conditions.

A Northeast marketer said there was no surprise in his region experiencing much of the greatest softness now that milder weather had become well established again. He didn’t see any serious return of cold weather in the foreseeable future that would be able to turn prices around.

Although Empire Pipeline now has FERC’s approval to activate an expansion that would take Marcellus Shale production in Pennsylvania to a Tennessee connection near the Canadian border, the marketer said he didn’t expect the expansion to mean much to markets for the time being. Primarily that’s because facilities have not yet been built for the gas to enter Canada, he said; currently at Chippewa, ON, it’s a one-way Canada-to-U.S. connection. However, he surmised that there was a possibility of gas becoming cheaper in Eastern Canada in the intermediate term because the Empire expansion was capable of displacing Canadian supply that normally might have been exported southward into the U.S.

The number of rigs engaged in U.S. gas-oriented activity took a big dive of 27 to 907 during the week ending Nov. 4, according to the Baker Hughes Rotary Rig Count. All 27 deactivations occurred onshore, while the Gulf of Mexico tally was unchanged, Baker Hughes said. Its latest count was 3% lower than a month ago and down 5% from previous-year levels.

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