Relatively light air conditioning load outside the West kept cash prices in a general decline Thursday, although nearly all drops were less than a dime and many points were flat or managed tiny gains. A bearish Nymex response to the storage report, prospects for continued weakness in weather fundamentals and the typical loss of industrial demand over a weekend are likely to have quotes falling again Friday, sources said.

The Energy Information Administration said 83 Bcf got put into storage last week, which dovetailed nicely with most previous expectations. However, the report was given a bearish spin as the volume not only handily surpassed the year-ago figure of 64 Bcf but was achieved during a week of major hurricane-related production losses and high power generation load. The screen fell quickly following the report and wound up with a daily loss of nearly 15 cents.

“I was kind of surprised that Nymex went lower in response to storage report, because the 83 Bcf area was pretty much what everyone was expecting,” a Midwest utility buyer said. He sees a good chance of getting a 100 Bcf-plus injection volume from EIA next week “since weather load in northern market areas has been do light this week.”

A couple of pipelines added bearish signals (see Transportation Notes) to the price picture. First, Florida Gas Transmission ended an Overage Alert Day notice (which indicates either shortfalls in receipts or overburns in the market area) after a three-day run. “Parts of our state are getting enough rain to cool off, allowing lifting of the OAD,” a Florida utility buyer commented.

Then Northern Natural Gas issued a System Underrun Limitation for all market-area zones. “The SUL means it [NNG] is taking on too much linepack, so the pipeline is telling shippers to trim those nominations,” a Midwest utility buyer said, adding, “We don’t have much weather load here at all.” He reported area highs in the mid 70s.

And one more hint of falling weekend prices came from late declines in Thursday morning’s activity. “Cash went down along with Nymex after the storage number came out,” said a Calgary-based producer. Of course, most people try to finish their cash deals before the EIA report, so little of the late softness gets reflected in that day’s numbers but tends to carry over into Friday business, he added. The producer said he did all his intra-Alberta sales on a same-day basis in the low C$5.50s because next-day numbers were lower

Thursday’s trading got interrupted by an outage of an online trading platform, according to a Houston-based marketer. “ICE [IntercontinentalExchange] went down for 30-45 minutes or so at mid-morning, which slowed dealing for a while as traders reverted to phone calls with each other.”

Several traders reported some talk about August business, but one’s assessment of “nothing substantive yet” reflected the consensus. NGI‘s official bidweek survey period begins Friday, but as another source observed, few are likely to do many deals Friday when they can wait until after the weekend and have the benefit of weather forecast data that is three days fresher.

A producer said he was hearing talk of the Chicago citygate at the NGI index minus 2 cents. That wasn’t surprising because discounts to index have been common in the Midcontinent/Midwest market this summer, he said. However, he expects Chicago to trade closer to index-flat as Tuesday’s futures expiry gets closer.

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