The return of cold weather and prior-day screen support combined to keep prices rising at nearly all points Wednesday, but with the exception of the Northeast, the gains were considerably smaller than Tuesday’s in most cases. Production-area receipts into Columbia Gulf were suspended following a tornado-caused explosion Tuesday night at a Tennessee compressor station (see related story).

Only a retreat of about a dime by Questar and Opal flatness prevented a repeat of Tuesday’s across the board uprising. Wednesday’s gains ranged from a little less than a nickel to about 55 cents. Unlike Tuesday when increases were fairly consistent across geographic market areas, Northeast citygates recorded significantly stronger gains than other regions Wednesday.

The latest cold snap looks to be short-lived, at least in the Midwest where temperatures were due to start rebounding by small amounts Thursday. However, the Midwest can expect “a fresh batch of arctic air and howling winds [to] crash the party on Saturday,” The Weather Channel said. The South is also due for a modest warm-up, and seasonal temperatures are expected to continue for a while longer there. Minimal accumulations of snow in much of the Northeast will be accompanied by lows around freezing. Cold weather and snow will continue in mountain areas of the West, but the rest of the region should be fairly moderate.

The good news for Gulf Coast producers who put gas into Columbia Gulf was that the pipeline said late Wednesday afternoon it hoped to restore flows through the tornado-struck Hartsville (TN) Compressor Station before the gas day ended. The bad news was that they had to figure out what to do with Columbia Gulf-nominated supplies Wednesday (and possibly Thursday or later if resumption of Hartsville flows is delayed for whatever reason). One source described it as a “scramble” to redirect gas from Columbia Gulf Wednesday.

The pipeline pledged to keep customers whole as long as possible through use of storage and said it was evaluating the safety of bypassing the station.

Takes exceeding deliveries prompted El Paso to warn shippers that it had set the probability to high of declaring a Strained Operating Condition or Critical Operating Condition due to low linepack. It said it would place performance caps on nonperforming supplies.

A utility buyer in the South said Wednesday morning it hadn’t gotten very cold in his area yet, but temperatures were predicted to be dropping during the day. Whereas his company had been a bit concerned around mid-January about being able to meet mandated storage drawdown ratchets, he said, the blasts of cold since then had allowed enough pulls that now it can “easily handle our schedule.” The utility can now choose on any given day to buy spot gas or use storage, whichever is more economic, he added.

Barclays Capital analysts George Hopley and Michael Zenker are forecasting a 210 Bcf withdrawal from storage for the week ending Feb. 1.

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