A moderate rally at eastern points Monday, combined with spikes in the Rockies and at the Southern California border, must have surprised at least a few traders who were not anticipating any respite from last week’s softness.

The East tended to range from a nickel to about 15 cents higher, with most gains around a dime or less. Meanwhile, an upcoming major supply outage in the Rockies pushed numbers there and at the California border 50 cents or more higher. However, other western points in Northern California, the Southwest basins and the Pacific Northwest blended in with the general market upticks.

Williams Field Services will be performing maintenance at the Opal (WY) Plant today and Wednesday, and has scheduled turbine inspections at two Kern River compressor stations in conjunction with the plant work. A marketer estimated that Opal has normal throughput of about 680 MMcf/d but will be running about half that volume for the next two days. “A lot of baseload markets were having to replace their Opal gas for those days or substitute somewhere else if possible,” he said. He thought the Kern River-Opal jump might stop with an early deal he did in the $4.90s, up about 80 cents from Friday, but then was able to make a couple of late sales when offers got as high as the low $5.60s.

Rockies price strength should last one more day, then start returning to normal Wednesday due to the Opal outage being scheduled to end Thursday, the marketer said. However, it could be extended for a short time if Opal-connected wells don’t come back online in a timely fashion, he added.

Meanwhile, the reasons for even a modicum of price firmness in the East were not nearly as readily obvious as in the Rockies. A stagnant screen provided virtually no input for cash traders. A forecasting service said weak cold fronts are due to move into the South and Northeast today and tonight, but they would be nothing like the out-of-season blasts of semi-winter last week.

A Midcontinent trader confessed that demand for today’s gas day was much heavier than he had expected. It’s not that cold in major northern market areas, he said, but he was hearing reports from other sources that a number of electric utilities from Texas through the Southeast and into the Mid-Atlantic were firing up gas peaking units as more normal spring warmth developed. Regardless, his prices were trending higher during the morning at the Chicago citygate and some field points.

May business talk remained mostly in the tire-kicking stage, sources said. However, a marketer reported a May deal at Malin for $10.30 and said that market was firming. Not long after his purchase, Malin was being bid at $10.45, he said.

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