With such locations as Little Rock, AR, and Shreveport, LA, destined to reach the low to mid 100s during the weekend and most other portions of the South hitting the mid 90s or so, cash prices managed to eke out small increases again Friday. That broke a down-up-down-up pattern established in the cash market earlier in the week.

Near-flat quotes remained common in much of the market, while ongoing highs around 100 or higher caused East Texas to lead gains ranging from 2-3 cents to about 15 cents. The few scattered losses were generally only a couple of pennies or so.

September futures finally had a little support for Monday’s cash market after the prompt-month contract rebounded by 4.8 cents (see related story).

Tropical Storm Harvey became the season’s eighth named system Friday afternoon, and instead of making landfall a little north of the Honduras/Nicaragua border as previously expected, it was moving westward just north of the Honduras coast toward an eventual trek over Belize and southern Mexico. Meanwhile, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) was also monitoring a large tropical wave about 800 miles east of the Lesser Antilles that it gave a 40% chance of becoming a tropical cyclone within the next 48 hours, and a broad low-pressure system about 175 miles southeast of the Cape Verde Islands that had 50% development odds, NHC said.

Other than growing temperature levels in the South, it was largely a status quo outlook of generally moderate August weather for most of the rest of the North American market.

A Midcontinent producer attributed Friday’s ongoing modest price strength to the market “reevaluating that there’s still a lot of heat” in many areas. Power generation buying remained big in his region, he said, but high production levels largely make that immaterial.

The jury is still out on whether liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from the United States will help prop up the domestic market, the producer continued. He doesn’t have much faith in that scenario himself; even if Europe and Asia are willing to pay higher prices for LNG, “gas produced here will stay here” for the most part, he said.

A Rockies producer said he and others in the area were amazed that this summer’s tremendous glut of Pacific Northwest hydropower didn’t have a devastating effect on Rockies prices, but he couldn’t help wondering “what would they [Rockies prices] be” if so much hydropower hadn’t been a factor.

But he noted hearing at a conference recently that the Rockies had 3 Bcf/d of excess takeaway capacity now and that volume was due to grow larger as Ruby Pipeline and Bison Pipeline either continued to ramp up or recover from a force majeure reduction, and a Kern River capacity expansion was on tap for this fall. Rockies production is dropping, he said, but it’s not nearly enough to offset the growth elsewhere that continues to limit gas prices.

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