A few flat to moderately higher points were in the mix, but for the most part cash prices saw no signs of a Monday rebound from the big weakness of weekend prices.

Mild softening by less than a dime dominated at a majority of points, although the Rockies did record some drops in double digits. The limited firmness was concentrated at the Southern California border and in the Northeast, where a warm-up is expected later this week.

Meanwhile, although it was impossible to determine with any certainty Monday, it appeared that many in the cash trading community will join Nymex and other financial markets in taking Friday off as part of a day of mourning for former President Ronald Reagan, who died over the weekend. Nearly all, if not all, of Thursday business is expected to be conducted for June 11-14 flows.

A Northeast utility buyer hadn’t heard yet about the scheduled Friday closure of futures trading, but said “we’ll [cash traders] do fine” making deals without Nymex if that’s necessary. He said his trading activity “has been kind of slow lately” anyway because a pigging operation on a regional pipeline was substantially restricting his flexibility on making sales by moving gas among various points. Some firmness in Northeast quotes Monday likely was in anticipation of area weather getting warmer, he said. “We should be reaching the 80s later this week.”

A major production outage in the Gulf of Mexico will last longer than expected. Shell Exploration & Production, which had estimated that a May 22 shutdown of its Mars Tension Leg Platform in Mississippi Canyon 807 due to damage to the oil pipeline flexjoint would last two to three weeks (see Daily GPI, May 26), said Monday repairs will require a longer shutdown than that (see related story). The company did not give a new projection on the return to service of Mars, which was producing 170 MMcf/d of gas and 150,000 bbl/d of oil prior to shutdown.

Except for border-SoCalGas deliveries, prices tended to be weakest in the West Monday. A positive factor was PG&E’s ending a high-linepack OFO that had been in effect Saturday and Sunday; however, much of the heat that had helped support western prices during the previous week was gone in northern portions of the region, although triple-digit highs were still being seen in the desert Southwest.

And over in the Southeast, daily highs were edging back up towards 90 degrees, but air conditioning load is still a bit subpar for the region at this time of year.

One source thought that pretty much the entire trading community is going to have to take Friday off. There are so many “balance shops” around now where if they don’t have Nymex to match up physical and paper risk, there’s a possibility of mismatched positions, “and that’s no longer allowed by many operations,” he explained. Any that don’t trade for four days Thursday and take Friday off are going to have lot of trouble squaring positions for any cash deals they manage to do Friday, he added.

A Calgary-based producer was one trader who expects to be in the office Friday. “We’ll be working, but probably not doing any cash deals,” instead catching up on paperwork, he said. The producer said it was interesting to watch Monday’s “little up and down ride” on Nymex. The Sumas market was fairly strong despite there being virtually no heating or cooling load in the Pacific Northwest, he observed.

“I think Sumas prices are being upheld by the strength at Westcoast Station 2,” he said, which is related to Westcoast’s Pine River Gas Plant being down for annual turnaround. That’s worth about 100 MMcf/d of supply through June 20, when Pine River should be three-quarters back up and due to return to full operation in early July, the producer said. He noted that Malin transport “didn’t work this morning unless you sold early;” later Malin numbers had moved too low to cover variable costs.

Citigroup’s Kyle Cooper said his final estimation for the upcoming storage report “indeed looks for a build right at the 100 Bcf level. A build between 95 and 105 Bcf is expected for the week ending July 4.”

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