Bears roamed the gas price forest with impunity Friday, sendingall markets down at least a nickel or so and causing severalWestern points to crater. Continued steamy weather in the Southeastand Midcontinent was no match for relatively mild conditions in themajor market areas of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. Andthe screen’s drop of about 4 cents didn’t lend any support.

The Southern California border and San Juan Basin wereparticularly weak as warmer California weather that had boostedprices earlier in the week was receding for the weekend. Tradingwas highly volatile but downhill all the way at both points, withthe border seeing a range of nearly 30 cents and San Juan-Blancospanning more than 20 cents from top to bottom. Averages for bothfell about 20 cents from Thursday.

Rockies points, finding weak demand both eastward and westward,experienced declines on either side of a dime. Even intra-Alberta,which had been steadily rising through the rest of the week, fellabout a dime as NOVA linepack recovered from earlier slackconditions.

The Midcontinent market saw little if any impact from theexplosion-caused outage of Amoco’s large Hugoton Jayhawk Plant (seeDaily GPI, July 10) as it joined the Gulf Coast in declines ofabout a nickel. “Everything was down and there was still a lot ofgas available near the end of trading,” a marketer said. He thoughtthe Jayhawk situation might have kept Midcontinent prices at leastflat, but it didn’t happen. However, noting that Jayhawk wasconnected to Williams only, another trader said that probably wasresponsible for Williams ranking among the Midcontinent’shighest-priced pipes Friday.

In a late Friday update Amoco said Jayhawk’s heat exchanger wasdamaged beyond repair, so a decision is “imminent” on whether tobuy an existing similar heat exchanger or build a new one. Theimportant thing, a spokesman said, is that the plant’s closure “nowis a matter of weeks rather than months.”

Mild weather for midsummer combined with the typical slump inweekend demand to drive down Northeast citygates by anywhere from anickel to nearly a dime, one trader said. “New York City needs toget up into the 90s to bring prices back up.” One service hadpredicted a high of 84 degrees Friday in the Big Apple.

©Copyright 1998 Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. Thepreceding news report may not be republished or redistributed, inwhole or in part, in any form, without prior written consent ofIntelligence Press,Inc.