Not including triple-digit spikes in the Rockies where a major transportation constraint was ending, the rest of the market was mixed Tuesday but with a decided bias to the downside. Prices felt negative pressure from very little cooling demand remaining but not much heating load to replace it; a 4-cent screen drop the day before; and reviving concerns that a dearth of storage injection capacity could lead to production shut-ins, according to some analysts.

Losses ranged from 2-3 cents to about 35 cents. Other points were flat to about $1.80 higher, but only the Rockies saw any gains of more than about 15 cents.

Although October futures rebounded by 6.4 cents Tuesday, that isn’t expected to be enough to rally the cash market Wednesday in the face of mild to cool temperatures dominating the national outlook. Although northern market areas are experiencing somewhat chilly conditions more suggestive of October than September and heating load has risen recently, it still isn’t very substantial, one source said. And power generation demand for air conditioning is pretty much confined to the area from Texas through the desert Southwest, he added.

Although Rockies points had participated in Monday’s overall rally, they were limited to the smallest gains because Northwest was required to extend the outage of its Pleasant View Compressor Station by one day through Tuesday (see Daily GPI, Sept. 19). But the pipeline announced that it was completing hydro-test work in its Moab District Tuesday and was accepting Intraday 1 cycle nominations for up to 200,000 Dth/d through Pleasant View compressor station for deliveries off the system’s south end. Pleasant View capacity for Wednesday will be for the full volume of 349,000 Dth/d, Northwest said.

However, the western market was mostly weaker outside the Rockies. SoCalGas waited until early Tuesday to send an e-mail notice of a high-linepack OFO for the same day; however, as of Tuesday afternoon it had not sent notification of an extension of the OFO through Wednesday. Its Northern California neighbor, PG&E, did not issue an OFO but was projecting on its Pipe Ranger bulletin board that system linepack would bump up against its maximum target level Wednesday and then go above the ceiling Thursday.

The necessity for the SoCalGas OFO was indicated by a one-third increase in nominated volumes into the LDC’s system for Tuesday, according to Bentek Energy. Bentek’s analysis of flows at 14 trading hubs (https://intelligencepress.com/features/bentek/) showed that SoCalGas saw a whopping increase of 747,000 MMBtu/d, or 33%, Tuesday over Monday’s levels.

The fuel buyer for a utility in the Upper South said his area is getting pleasant daytime highs in the mid 70s, and although overnight lows are dipping into the mid to high 50s, he didn’t think any customers were turning on any furnaces yet. A lot of people are getting excited about the large recent declines in winter futures prices, he said. He hadn’t heard anything about October bidweek yet, but said his company was getting ready to communicate its next-month needs to suppliers. Even though October is considered a shoulder month, the utility will be buying a fairly large amount of gas, both to top off its storage accounts and because it starts getting some heating load as October goes along, he said.

The National Weather Service predicted above normal temperatures during the Sept. 25-29 workweek everywhere except the coast areas of the Mid-Atlantic east of a line running northeastward from south-central New Mexico through the western end of the Oklahoma Panhandle and encompassing nearly all of the Midcontinent and all of the Midwest except for the northern half of Wisconsin. It expects below normal temperatures nearly everywhere west of a line also running northeastward from the southern end of the Arizona-New Mexico border through northwest New Mexico and central Colorado to the northwest corner of Minnesota.

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