There were exceptions to the overall trend in each area Wednesday, but generally eastern prices rose by as much as a little more than 30 cents while the West was mostly softer with losses extending to a little over a dollar in one case. Traders tended to credit the moderate rebounds in the East to strength in overnight Access futures trading, while a high-inventory OFO by the PG&E utility (see Transportation Notes) helped indicate the dearth of demand in the West.

One source suggested that Wilma’s becoming the most intense Atlantic Basin hurricane ever with a pressure of 882 millibars might have had something to do with the eastern show of bullishness, but a marketer said he was unable to sense any remaining jitteriness about the possibility of the storm threatening the offshore production area. Meteorologists’ projections continued to have Wilma on a path bound for southern Florida, he noted.

BP confirmed Wednesday that it had begun evacuating nonessential employees from facilities in the central and eastern Gulf of Mexico (GOM), but the company said nothing about whether it had shut-in any additional production. The marketer noted that there was some flowing gas in the eastern Gulf that could be shut in, but most of that area’s supplies were still offline from the effects of Hurricane Katrina more than a month and a half earlier.

With maximum sustained winds of nearly 160 mph, Wilma was approaching Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as a potentially catastrophic Category Five hurricane (winds greater than 155 mph), the National Hurricane Center said. At 5 p.m. EDT Wednesday the center of Wilma was about 285 miles southeast of Cozumel, Mexico and moving toward the west-northwest at nearly 7 mph, it added. A turn to the northwest was expected over the following 24 hours.

Northwest-South of Green River led the western losses with a fall of slightly over a dollar. Besides the general weakness of western demand, its numbers were hammered by a two-day outage of the pipeline segment between the Rangely and Cisco Compressor Stations that starts Thursday (see Transportation Notes).

Restoration of shut-in Gulf of Mexico (GOM) production has slowed to a near-trickle again, as Minerals Management Service reported a gain of only 103.54 MMcf/d Wednesday. Based on reports from 67 companies, the agency counted 5,242.12 MMcf/d as remaining offline, meaning GOM gas output is still a little less than half of normal.

The “little bit of cash strength we saw today [Wednesday]” was based primarily on futures strength in overnight Access activity, said a Gulf Coast producer who trades the Northeast. He reported still seeing little weather-based demand, actually almost none to speak of. Overnight lows are in the 40s in lower Northeast but daytime highs are in the 70s, and the cold doesn’t last long enough each day to boost gas load meaningfully, he said. “Besides, the customers aren’t really too crazy about paying for $14 gas,” he added.

The producer said Wednesday was a “pretty lackluster” trading day, which allowed some time to start thinking about November business. He expects something of a wild bidweek, saying the hurricane shut-ins have “kind of thrown a wet blanket on term business” for the last couple of months, but he thinks term deals will start picking up again with the official start of the winter heating season imminent.

Another Gulf Coast producer was in agreement that it was Access futures strength, plus moderate firmness in the early open-outcry trading Wednesday, that helped boost most eastern prices. She anticipates an “interesting” storage report Thursday, “especially if it’s another big injection like the one last week.” Texas still has a bit of air conditioning load hanging around, she said, but that won’t last long with a cool front due to move into the state Thursday.

This producer also said she had started “getting geared up a little” for bidweek but hadn’t done any November deals yet. “I don’t even try to guess any more which way indexes will go,” she said, but based on November futures being about 35 cents below the October settlement Wednesday, “if anything I’d expect off a little.”

A Houston-based marketer said he was a little surprised by the modest cash strength, since he didn’t see any significant weather demand developing in his primary Midwest market area through at least the end of the week.

Basically the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast for the Oct. 24-28 workweek boils down to a warm West and cool East. The agency looks for above normal temperatures everywhere west of a line running southwestward from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to southeast New Mexico, except for normal conditions in coastal strips of Oregon and California. NWS expects below normal readings everywhere south and east of a line from southern New England through the central Midwest to the Texas-Louisiana border; the exception in this case is a normal outlook for the southern tip of Florida.

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