With the Houston trade fair ended, the cash market startedreturning to normal Friday. And continuing the pattern seen formost of February, “normal” meant essentially flat pricing. Butsigns of weakening were more evident as small downticks notablyincreased in frequency. Some of the softness was attributable tothe normal weekend drops in gas demand.

But in stark contrast to the generally flat to slightly lowermarket, Northeast citygates were soaring well above $2 in severalcases as averages for Texas Eastern M-3 and Transco Zone 6 gainednearly a dime. Anticipation of colder weather sparked the rises;Tennessee said Friday afternoon it anticipated having to restrictservices starting today downstream of its compressor stations inLibertyville, NJ and Nassau, NY for that reason. One traderreported a Transco Zone 5 (mid-Atlantic) sale at $2.05, about thesame area as her Zone 6-non- New York City deals.

Otherwise the market was dominated by small declines of 1-3cents mixed with continued flatness. A marketer said the Westtended to be slightly softer, but not as soft as he had expected.

It was highly unusual for ANR to order interruptible storagecustomers to empty their accounts by April 1 (see Daily GPI, Feb.18), a Midwest trader said; normally the pipeline just haltsinjections instead. However, he saw little likelihood of the actiondepressing the Michigan citygate market during March because hebelieves there isn’t much that much interruptible inventory leftanyway. ANR suspended DDS account injections late last year, andthat didn’t leave much of an injection window, he said.

The timing of last week’s trade fair in Houston contributed to arelative dearth of pre-bidweek activity in March business. Severalsources said that as of Friday they had not even had a chance tocheck out basis talk. However, one said she was hearing fixedpricing of $1.71-72 at Malin. Another who did not attend the fairreported summer (April-October) basis for Michigan citygates atplus 4.5-5.25.

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