Prices continued to rely on the bullish combination of significant heating load in several market areas and a strong day-earlier screen to achieve further gains at nearly all points Thursday. Upward momentum was building as most upticks were larger than those on Wednesday. The exception was Northeast citygates, which — except for Transco Zone 6-New York City recording a second straight spike of about a dollar — rose at a slower pace than Wednesday and included Dracut, the only point to see a setback of about 15 cents.

Excluding Dracut and NYC, advances ranged from a little less than a dime to a little more than 35 cents (Westcoast Station 2 was up about C45 cents). A large majority were remarkably consistent across all regions in settling between 20 cents and 35 cents higher.

A cold front that had moved into the South contributed some — but not much — additional heating demand to already strong load in the Northeast and Midwest. Both of the latter two regions were due for slight breaks from the cold, but would remain quite chilly through the weekend.

The West scored strong moves higher despite having some of the milder weather in the U.S. Kern River was up about 30 cents despite having reported high linepack for several days and issuing a warning Thursday that banking gas on its system continues to be a problem.

Bearish storage news may help slightly milder weather trends and the usual weekend drop in industrial load drag this week’s rally to a halt Friday. The Energy Information Administration estimated a withdrawal of 88 Bcf for the week ending Feb. 18. The volume was toward the low end of prior expectations, but after a slightly bearish initial response, the natural gas screen began to climb — even though crude oil futures for April delivery was trading in the red at the time. However, after spending some time about 20 cents, March futures retreated and exited as the prompt month down 0.7 cent.

There was remarkably little mention of the fact that for the second month in a row, the futures expiry coincided with a storage report day. Perhaps that was because nothing happened during the February bidweek that reminded traders of the day-before-Thanksgiving fiasco last year.

A Gulf Coast marketer found it puzzling that Nymex had managed to trade higher even for a limited amount of time. “It was a bearish storage report, but prices go up? Go figure,” she said. She noted that after a cold early March, the forecasts call for “a lot of mild weather.” With the big year-on-year surplus in storage, she found it hard to imagine what could keep prices from crashing next month.

The March futures contract went off the board at $6.304, just barely above February’s expiry at $6.288. That portends that most March first-of-month indexes will be fairly close. But the Northeast promises to be an exception, because basis levels being quoted for March are way below the hyperinflated ones that dominated trading for February baseload.

An industrial end-user said it was an “uneventful” bidweek for him. Because he was traveling Wednesday, he said he did all his March deals Tuesday. However, he did everything at index, and thus wouldn’t get the benefit of the earliest fixed-price quotes being lower than subsequent ones. The end-user said he had actually been selling some gas on the day market recently because of operations being curtailed at one of his company’s our plants, but the facility is back to full operation now.

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