It didn’t take long for “storm hype” to get blown away as a price booster. Even with Minerals Management Service (MMS) reporting that more than 2 Bcf/d of Gulf of Mexico production was shut in Wednesday due to the proximity of Tropical Storm Bonnie, all points fell between a dime and about a quarter in cash trading.

Weakness of weather fundamentals dominated the market mood again as it became obvious that Bonnie and now-Hurricane Charley apparently are both headed for landfalls in Florida and that shut-ins in the central Gulf will be fleeting. The fading threat of prolonged lost production yielded to the reality of mild to cool mid-autumnlike weather throughout much of the U.S. and Canada, with the only real heat appropriate for the “dog days” of August confined to the Southwest and along the West Coast.

Cold fronts will be featured in the weather outlooks for the South, Midwest and Northeast through the weekend, according to The Weather Channel, and the Rocky Mountain region also is experiencing below normal temperatures. Date-specific record lows are a possibility early Thursday in the Midwest, it said.

Natural gas futures also reflected the shift in market influences. The September contract settled at $5.614, down 17.7 cents for the session, despite modest rallies in the petroleum products section at Nymex.

In a survey based on reports from 33 companies, the MMS said it tallied a total of 2,047.97 MMcf/d of gas, along with 419,377 bbl/d of oil, in offshore shut-ins Wednesday. It also reported the evacuation of 108 production platforms and 37 drilling rigs. The shut-in gas represents 16.65% of the approximate 12.3 Bcf/d of Gulf of Mexico output, MMS said.

Some outages will remain in effect through Thursday or Friday, but the volumes involved are expected to be decreasing. Sonat posted a list of 14 offshore receipt points that it had confirmed as being shut in.

A Northeast utility buyer said his company had lost about 5 MMcf/d Tuesday from offshore shut-ins, but nothing Wednesday. That was sort of odd, he thought, because one likely would have expected it to be the other way around. The lost gas was part of the supply he’d bought in the daily market for Tuesday, not first-of-month baseload, he said. He reported “kind of avoiding” moving gas on Tennessee until the storm situation completely passes, thinking that swing gas cuts might be more likely on that pipe.

There’s almost no weather load to be seen in the Northeast, with 70s highs during the day accompanied by nighttime temperatures of 50-60 degrees, the buyer went on. “I don’t see anything that would keep prices from continuing to drop for the rest of the week.”

It looks like “cold fronts all around have got prices going in the direction we want: down,” commented a Midwest marketer. Her company was not buying swing supplies this week, having loaded up heavily in the day market last week. That turned out to be a good move because prices were lower then prior to the run-ups in the first two days of this week, “so our clients were able to put the excess into storage and make use of that gas now.” The marketer remarked that she was “hearing that El Nino is gearing up again, which usually means milder winters.”

Bonnie was believed capable of joining Charley in hurricane status before making an expected Thursday morning landing in the central Florida Panhandle, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said. A hurricane warning was issued for parts of the Panhandle and northwest Florida from Destin eastward to the mouth of the Suwannee River, and a hurricane watch and tropical storm warming remained in effect for the western Panhandle from west of Destin to the Alabama/Florida border. At 4 p.m. CDT Wednesday the center of Bonnie was about 165 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River and about 340 miles southwest of Appalachicola, FL. The storm had quickened a bit from the day before, moving northeastward at 12 mph.

Charley was moving near Jamaica and headed for the Cayman Islands, the NHC said. In addition to hurricane warnings for both nations and a hurricane watch for parts of Cuba, a watch was also in effect for much of the Florida Keys and the southwest coast of Florida and likely will have been extended northward along the Sunshine State’s west coast by Thursday. At 5 p.m. EDT Charley’s center was about 85 miles southwest of Kingston, Jamaica. The hurricane was moving toward the west-northwest at nearly 17 mph, representing a slowdown since Tuesday.

Charley is a big storm that brings to mind “super-hurricanes” that have devastated Caribbean islands in the past, Weather 2000 said. It shouldn’t be written off entirely quite yet as a nonthreat to offshore production, but does face a couple of obstacles, the consulting firm said Wednesday. First, there is the expected weakening contact with island land masses, which means “a lot has to go right for Charley to exactly thread his way into the Gulf of Mexico unscathed as official forecasts illustrate.” Then, “even if Charley does make it into the Gulf of Mexico, he will be confronted with cold water scarring yielded by Bonnie, who will have churned up the deeper, cooler waters a few days before Charley’s arrival, limiting continued strengthening.”

The greatest threat now, according to Weather 2000, is that both storms could be regenerated in the warm Gulf Stream waters of the Atlantic after passing over the southeastern corner of the U.S. and then cause major damage in the Mid-Atlantic.

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