Much of the market seemingly was put on hold Tuesday as flat to slightly higher numbers prevailed. Tropical Storm Chantal continued to recede as a potential threat to Gulf production, and hot weather demand remained generally light outside the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast and Midcontinent areas. Mostly, though, the market was reported as very quiet as the trading community awaited this afternoon’s first release of new AGA storage data since last week’s bombshell of a low volume.

Several sources talked of whether AGA would be able to regain traders’ “trust” with today’s report. One said he was hearing expectations ranging from 50 Bcf to the mid 80s, with most of them ranging from the upper 60s to the low 80s. “I think those were without assuming a ‘correction,’ but I can’t be sure,” he said. A marketer said the trouble with the report’s timing is that “we’ve got to finish cash trading before getting any new storage clues.”

Chantal weakened to a tropical depression Tuesday afternoon as it continued its trek across Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, although the National Weather Service said it could re-intensify upon emerging into the Bay of Campeche. At 4 p.m. CDT the center of Chantal was about 95 miles west of Chetumal, Mexico, NWS said. The storm is expected to stay on a mostly westerly course that would keep it well away from U.S. production in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

“That’s a relief; I can do without that [disruption of Gulf supplies],” an eastern utility buyer said of Chantal’s unthreatening nature. He said temperatures were in the 80s and conditions pretty humid in the Northeast Tuesday, but a cooling trend was due around Friday.

Rockies/San Juan points saw some of Tuesday’s larger increases largely due to a thunderstorm that knocked out nearly half of the Opal Plant’s capacity Monday night. In addition, Kern River was warning shippers against drafting the system because of not only the Opal constraint, but also equipment outages at several other receipt points. A Rockies marketer said many traders did not learn about the Opal situation until Tuesday morning after a fair amount of deals had already been completed; otherwise Kern River and Opal numbers might have gotten more of a boost.

A storm-related failure of a relief valve Monday night at the Williams Field Services-operated Opal Plant caused a power outage that knocked the TXP (turbo expander) I and TXP II processing trains out of service. One train remains in operation. WFS was able to keep customers whole for Monday’s gas day, but a reduction of 350 MMcf/d from the plant’s normal throughput of 800 MMcf/d began with Tuesday’s Intraday 1 cycle, a WFS spokesman said. No gas is able to flow down the WFS 30-inch pipe until the problem is corrected, which the spokesman said could be as early as tonight.

An extension of El Paso’s low-linepack OFO helped drive up border-SoCalGas prices by about a dime as people scrambled for gas, a western marketer said. Other California upticks were less in response to lower power prices, he said. At NP-15, for example, peak prices traded down to $35-36/MWh while off-peak traded as low as $27-28. “With power prices that depressed, it just didn’t make sense to burn $3.50 gas, and as a result [some] generators opted to turn off their generation.” He was not sure what precipitated the fall in power prices, saying, “Weather does not seem to be a factor.

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