Cash prices registered gains Wednesday that were between 15 and 25 cents at nearly all points. Colder weather moving into the Midwest was the primary eastern driver, a Midcontinent marketer said. However, another trader said heat in California was more responsible for the western upticks.

“It’s pretty much all the near-term weather forecasts” pushing prices higher, the Midcontinent marketer said. “Chicago is already down several degrees today, and due to get colder when that Canadian cold front reaches it.” One forecasting service estimated the front would be in the eastern Midwest sometime today.

“I don’t know if the back half of October is going to hold up this well, though,” the marketer continued. The current run-up may not last beyond this week, he added. His opinion appeared to reflect a consensus that the market does not have the legs to keep rising more than another couple of days. The huge storage surplus is almost certain to send prices lower again, as weather moderates and traders begin losing the injection option as a home for their gas, sources said.

Even producers conceded that this week’s rally won’t last much longer. “Let’s see if it even lasts though the weekend,” one said. “With all the storage we have built up, we’re going to need something more than just a little weather. To change the market profoundly, we would need an Ice Age.”

Another producer noted that the screen uptick of about a nickel combined with substantially larger cash increases to achieve some of the convergence that had been anticipated recently while cash was running well below futures levels. He believes that “what happens this weekend will determine the rest of the month. If prices are strong and don’t have their usual Friday downturn, we are likely to see more convergence between October [cash] and November [futures].”

Cold was the story east of the Rockies, but it was heat, especially in California, that western traders were talking about. Sacramento set a date-specific heat record of 104 degrees Tuesday, and reached 100 degrees Wednesday. However, some relief was expected today, as Sacramento would only hit about 90 degrees, a forecaster said.

A Rockies trader thought gas there likely was getting pulled in opposite directions: west to help alleviate the heat and east to supplement the growing load from furnaces being fired up. Much of the Rockies region will be developing heating load of its own as cold fronts move in today.

An East Coast utility buyer found it hard to fathom why prices jumped for him Wednesday “when we’re still more than a day away from cold weather here.” But he couldn’t deny that the Midwest developments were having an impact on prices in the area well ahead of the front, which was expected to reach the East Coast Friday.

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