Another Friday, another price rout. In a seeming rerun from a week earlier, weekend prices tanked hard Friday in response to lack of weather-related load and a bearish storage report in which the 81 Bcf injection exceeded most prior expectations.

Once again losses at several points exceeded a dollar, with the overall range of declines running from about a quarter to more than $1.20. Most surpassed half a dollar. The first week of October ended with a few Gulf Coast points only 10-20 cents or so below first-of-month indexes, but otherwise the market’s deficits to index ranged from about 35 cents to more than a dollar.

The midweek touches of chill in the Midwest and Northeast and heat in the Southwest had faded in each instance, leaving generally comfortable temperatures for the weekend in virtually all market areas. Cooldowns will be developing around the middle of next week in several regions, The Weather Channel said, but until then thermometer readings will primarily be in the 60s and 70s.

The West took most of the biggest price hits. Not only was weather demand in short supply there, but both of California’s giant LDCs — SoCalGas and PG&E — issued an OFO against high linepack (see Transportation Notes). In addition, Kern River said it was experiencing high linepack in all four segments after reporting normal linepack systemwide earlier in the week.

Monday is Canada’s Thanksgiving Day holiday, so deals at Canadian points, including Sumas, were done for flows through Tuesday, said a Calgary-based producer. The Sumas market was rather odd, he went on. Although down about a dollar on average, quotes were going up from early lows “until people quit hitting bids and the supply disappeared,” he said. Instead of having prices fall back late, Sumas trading essentially halted at that point, he added.

Malin was an active market despite PG&E’s OFO, and prices there behaved similarly to Sumas in starting much softer but moving higher as trading proceeded, the producer said. In trying to explain the uptrends, he speculated that the current outages of the Palo Verde 3 and San Onofre nuclear reactors may have spurred some gas-fired generation to chase the sparse western power load, and the few people that have storage space still open might have been bargain hunting.

For unknown reasons, some traders were willing to pay unnecessarily high prices at Henry Hub for the second day in a row. The Hub, which had stood out Thursday by advancing 21 cents while most of the Gulf Coast softened, went with the market flow Friday in falling nearly 60 cents. However, its top end of $6.30 easily outpaced anything else (except for an aberrant $7.60 quote in FGT’s Zone 3 that apparently was related to offshore shut-ins), including Northeast citygates, and was more than a dollar above the low end of Henry Hub’s range and more than 60 cents above the daily average.

Florida utility buyers were released from a longstanding Overage Alert Day (OAD) notice on Florida Gas Transmission (see Transportation Notes). Asked how it felt to be without an OAD for a change, one replied, “It’s a very odd feeling.” The staffer who is primarily responsible for the utility’s compliance was literally “dancing in the hallway,” the buyer said. Lifting of the notice likely was linked to “very fine weather” in the state that would last through the weekend, she said.

Restoration of shut-in production in the Gulf of Mexico stalled again. With 19 companies reporting to it, Minerals Management Service said there was no change Friday from the previous day’s tally of 1,775.12 MMcf/d in offline supply. The week ended with the cumulative total of deferred offshore production caused by Hurricane Ivan since Sept. 11 standing at 72.279 Bcf, which equals 1.624% of the Gulf’s approximate yearly output of 4.45 Tcf, MMS said.

Stormy weather along the Louisiana and Texas coasts hampered the repair of offshore infrastructure last week. And although the Atlantic tropical scene was quiet Friday, a tropical disturbance in the western Gulf had time to develop before moving to the northern Gulf coast over the weekend, according to The Weather Channel. Naturally that would cause further delay in reversing shut-ins. (The disturbance was dubbed Tropical Storm Matthew late Friday afternoon.)

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