The cold spell currently enveloping Canada and most of the U.S. again propelled the spot market higher Thursday, but the advances were considerably smaller than the previous day’s spikes and were interspersed with flat to moderately lower numbers at a few points in the Gulf Coast and Midcontinent.

Double-digit gains were prevalent in Thursday’s market, compared with solid triple-digit upticks Wednesday. Overall, price increases ranged from about a nickel to $1.25. Western and Northeast quotes tended to see most of the larger increases.

Chances of upward price movement continuing Friday are slim. Chilly weather will continue to dominate the national picture, but temperatures will be trending back toward mid-November norms in all regions through the weekend, according to The Weather Channel. Other bearish influences include a large storage injection instead of a withdrawal in this week’s report accompanied by a sizeable screen drop Thursday and the usual slump of industrial load during a weekend.

The Energy Information Administration conformed with consensus expectations in reporting a storage injection of 53 Bcf for the week ended Nov. 11. Naturally such a hefty build during the first full week of what is considered the traditional withdrawal season, leaving inventories just 18 Bcf shy of the highly comfortable 3.3 Tcf level, was considered bearish. But the continuing massive shortfall from normal Gulf Coast production complicated the situation and reduced the storage comfort level somewhat (see futures story). Nevertheless, after an initial rally just after the report was released the screen began tumbling to an eventual loss of 38.7 cents on the day.

Noting that the build was a record for the second week in November, Citigroup analyst Kyle Cooper said, “Inventories have only been higher once, last year actually, in early November since 1994. Weekly data is not available before 1994. Unless Mother Nature returns to her incredibly bullish ways of the summer, inventories are likely to remain well above historical averages throughout the winter.”

With less than two weeks remaining in the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, it’s looking unlikely that the Gamma name will be applied to a storm. The low-pressure remnants of Tropical Depression 27 moved ashore into Nicaragua, ending any possibility of development.

The current cold snap “was a little shock for our system,” said a Lower Midwest utility buyer. “One day you have 75 degrees and three days later you have 20.” But since she had a lot of supply that had been piling up during balmier days earlier this month, it was beneficial for company throughput in the long run. “Our storage is full, so we were running out of places to put gas” until the cold arrived, she continued. Area temperatures were due to warm up to normal in the 50s this weekend before getting a little cooler again early next week, she said.

A marketer in the Upper Midwest said her city had experienced some snowfall overnight, and more was in the forecast “off and on” over the next several days, but “only a little bit is sticking.” It was a rude awakening since last Saturday’s 60-degree temperatures, she said. The local wind chill factor was in the upper teens Thursday, but she was hearing reports of negative wind chills in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. No major break in the cold was in sight at this point, the marketer said, but highs should moderate slightly into the 40s next week.

After a couple of days of minuscule gains, the process of restoring shut-in Gulf of Mexico production speeded up, but not by much. With 66 companies reporting, Minerals Management Service said 3,648.01 MMcf/d remained offline Thursday — 65.36 MMcf/d less than the day before.

“November cold socks it to nation,” proclaimed New York City-based Weather 2000 in leading off its Thursday advisory. It noted that 45 of the contiguous 48 states hit the freezing mark that morning, and several of them had plummeted to single-digit temperatures. In addition, there were numerous states with observable snow cover, and lake-effect snows of more than a foot were being dumped on cities leeward of the Great Lakes, the consulting firm said. It predicted that the eastern half of the U.S. should run off at least two to three weeks of below normal temperature.

“Many people were skeptical of a hot 2005 summer, all the way through the cool May,” Weather 2000 continued. “But even when a hot June developed, and acceptance (of our warnings) increased, there were very few reference points in the past 25 years for people to psychologically anticipate exactly how hot a “hot summer” could be. This is a somewhat similar predicament we face on the eve of the 2005-2006 winter. We had a very snowy 1995-1996 season, but net winter temperatures [then] did not eclipse the top historical percentiles. We had a very chilly November-December in 2000, only to be washed away by a very mild January-March. 2002-2003 was an impressively persistent Winter, but it lacked some of the brutally frigid weeks witnessed [in] the past two years…[K]eep in mind that we are walking close to unchartered territory if an intensely hot summer, followed by an intensely severe hurricane [period], is then followed by an intensely brutal winter.”

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