Thursday’s July futures dive of 34.9 cents and forecasts for a weekend reversal of modest warming trends that had been occurring in the Midwest and Northeast resulted in double-digit drops at most points in trading for the first weekend of summer Friday. The decline of industrial load that accompanies a weekend market also played a part.

All but one of the exceptions to overall softness were in the Rockies, where regional heat drove numbers higher by anywhere from a little less than 15 cents to about half a dollar. Denver temperatures were expected to peak around 90 degrees Saturday, according to Madison, WI-based Weather Central, and The Weather Channel (TWC) said weekend readings in the 90s would extend to northern Montana. (Dracut in the Northeast was the only point outside the Rockies to record a gain.)

Losses ranged from about a nickel to nearly 90 cents. Northern Natural-Ventura was the only declining point where prices fell by less than a dime.

The Midwest already was starting to cool down a bit, with Chicago’s Friday high in the low 80s expected to drop about five degrees Saturday. Temperatures were still rising going into the weekend in the Northeast; New York City was forecast to peak around 87 Saturday while Boston was due to hit around 81. However, severe thunderstorms Sunday along with a cold front pushing through the Appalachians into the Northeast would have mercury levels dropping again before the end of the weekend, according to TWC.

Daily highs below seasonal norms were spreading in the South. Most of the region east of the Mississippi River (except for Florida) continued to be limited to the 80s, and New Orleans, which had been peaking in the low 90s last week, would see its high dip to the mid 80s Saturday, Weather Central said.

Florida Gas Transmission extended an Overage Alert Day into at least its third day Friday, but its price-boosting effects were shattered. The Florida citygate and Florida Gas Zone 3 saw Friday’s largest losses of nearly 90 cents and nearly 70 cents, respectively.

All Texas Eastern points recorded sizeable declines despite the pipeline reporting Friday that it was “experiencing large due-pipe imbalances on its system.” If customers didn’t take immediate action to resolve such imbalances, Texas Eastern said, it “will take action as permitted by the tariff.”

And although searing heat would remain in the desert Southwest and much of inland California, and El Paso said its linepack had returned to normal after being excessively high Thursday, some of Friday’s largest downturns occurred in the San Juan Basin and at the Southern California border.

The lack of weather-based demand in most of the East outside the South was the primary factor in Friday’s price drops, although they were abetted by Thursday’s screen dive, a Gulf Coast producer said. It will be cooling again over the weekend in the Midwest and Northeast market areas, he noted.

The producer thought “psychological fears” about being able to refill storage this year had a large role in supporting cash prices up until Friday. There will be more heat near the end of the month, he said, but it won’t be especially substantial, so he considered it doubtful whether Friday’s screen uptick of 13.3 cents will be able to rally cash prices Monday.

It’s rather surprising how the Gulf Coast market has absorbed the return of near-full production by Independence Hub without softening until Friday, the producer went on. One would have expected the return of 900 MMcf/d in supplies to have been more bearish, he said.

He noted that natural gas futures “have been following oil lately” with little regard to fundamental influences.

Very little July business is happening yet, the producer said, but he thinks traders are going to come back into the office Monday “and start pounding it hard.”

His company has lost a lot of its normal load due to the flooding that has devastated much of the Midwest during the last two weeks, a utility buyer in the region reported. As a result, he has been selling baseload gas instead of buying in the spot market.

The buyer said he had not done any July deals yet, but he was sensing a reluctance of sellers to commit early. He supposed that they’re anticipating higher prices later due to forecasts of June-ending heat.

It was a pretty slow market week, a Gulf Coast trader said. Besides the College World Series in Omaha, vacations and other trader get-togethers have kept offices lightly staffed at many of her trading counterparties.

Drilling rigs searching for natural gas in the U.S. increased by 10 to 1,514 during the week ending June 20, according to the Baker Hughes Rotary Rig Count (https://intelligencepress.com/features/bakerhughes/). Three were added in the Gulf of Mexico while the onshore count rose by seven. The overall tally was up 1% from both a month earlier and the year-ago level, Baker Hughes said.

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