After another large storage injection volume from AGA and the screen’s accompanying plunge Wednesday, it wasn’t a very tough call to predict falling cash numbers Thursday. Sure enough, a price rout was on as nearly all points fell by about a quarter or more when fundamental demand factors proved unable to make up for the twin depressants of a further futures drop Thursday and the record-setting pace of storage refills so early in the injection season.

It was another quiet market day with weather-related gas demand remaining benign for the most part, a Northeast trader said. “It looks like cash will be following the screen around until some major weather changes happen,” and there’s little sign of that in the near future, he said. Noting that only two weeks remain before the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, the trader jested, “I guess that gives us something to look forward to.”

There’s still not a great deal of air conditioning demand coming from electric utilities, according to a Gulf Coast marketer. However, although prices in his market started the morning “very weak,” they rallied about a nickel on several pipes toward the end of trading as some people had to cover short supply positions, he said. The marketer looks for more price weakness today since the screen fell again and the usual weekend falloff in gas load will have its effect.

Once again PG&E-related points saw the biggest losses of the day after the utility changed Thursday’s customer-specific OFO into a systemwide one today with zero tolerance for positive imbalances (see Transportation Notes). One western trader said it was “all a matter of deal timing” that her PG&E-Topock and citygate quotes being so close together in the vicinity of $4.60. The points are usually about 20 cents apart, which is the approximate Baja Path IT charge from the border on PG&E, she said. But most Baja shippers have FT contracts, so since they’re going to pay the demand charge whether they use the capacity or not, they’re mainly concerned with covering the 1.37% Baja fuel cost, the trader added. She also noted that with citygates going so low due to the OFO, “it certainly didn’t make sense to try to ship gas to the gate from the Permian Basin” Thursday.

After getting a few scattered sub-$3 quotes earlier in the week, Rockies pipes averaged solidly less than $3 Thursday. The last time that happened prior to this week was in mid-August 2000. Since then Rockies prices have climbed a huge hill that crested at more than $9 last January before gradually descending back to the current levels under $3.

Quoting intra-Alberta in the low C$5.60s, a Calgary marketer said provincial numbers hadn’t fallen as much as many traders had expected after the big screen dive Wednesday.

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