Lacking much else in motivational factors beyond Tuesday’sfutures dive, cash prices softened Wednesday as expected.Across-the-board decreases ranged from barely a penny to as much asa dime. A Midcontinent marketer was surprised the drops weren’t anygreater than 2-5 cents in her region.

Some of the largest drops occurred at opposite ends of Texas assources reported small but noticeable declines in electric loadafter showers had cooled parts of the state. Katy and Houston ShipChannel led the Gulf Coast softening, while both El Paso andTranswestern in the Permian Basin and Waha matched their easterncounterparts by falling about a dime.

A Gulf Coast trader said some big producers were short onTennessee, supporting Zone 1 (Louisiana) prices in the high $1.70s.

A marketer doesn’t expect to see much more price slide, if any,in the West. The region still has a lot of people short on physicalgas, she said, “and it’s still hot in California.” But a source inthe state, while acknowledging “this [Wednesday] is the hot day forthe week,” said temperatures should be cooler by the weekend.

One trader thought the AGA storage injection report of 75 Bcfseemed on the high side, commenting that physical demand in theWest had seemed too strong recently to allow such a large injectionvolume.

An earthquake hit the lower San Francisco Bay area Wednesday,but it was too weak to cause any significant damage to PG&E’stransmission and distribution operations, the utility said.

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