With a little help from a prior-day futures gain of 3.3 cents, forecasts of rapidly receding temperatures Wednesday in the Midcontinent and Midwest were able to keep a large majority of prices on an upward track Tuesday. Western lows scheduled to be in the 20s and 30s Wednesday in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest also contributed to the overall firmness, although most of Tuesday’s losses occurred in the Rockies.

Gains were spread among a much greater and more geographically diverse number of points than in Monday’s overall rebound. Most of the market was flat to about 85 cents higher. Declines ranged from 2-3 cents to a little more than 15 cents.

The top advance of about 85 cents was somewhat deceptive since it occurred at Carthage Hub. The hub had plunged half a dollar Monday due to a one-day outage of the Duke processing plant there scheduled for Tuesday; the end of the outage Wednesday allowed Carthage numbers to recover to some extent, although its average trailed all of the neighboring East Texas trading points for NGPL-TexOk..

Excluding Carthage, Tuesday’s top increase was a little more than 35 cents.

Midwest citygates tended to see most of the largest gains as a quick return to sub-freezing lows was forecast after a one-day thaw-out. Chicago, which had its low get up to about 43 Tuesday, could expect to bottom out just under 30 Thursday. Most of the Midcontinent would approach the freezing level but stay just above it.

Weather somewhat resembling spring will continue to reign in the South, with nearly all locations expected to peak in the 70s Wednesday. The Northeast isn’t due to get quite that warm, but New York City’s expected high in the low 60s will be quite unseasonably mild for mid-February.

Even though Rockies temperatures will still be fairly cold, with Denver predicted to see a high of 48 and low of 23, that actually represents a warming trend from Tuesday. It helps explain why the Rockies was softer than any other market area. Despite an expected low around 10 in Calgary, NOVA Inventory Transfer quotes were flat.

With March futures diving by 26.4 cents Tuesday (see related story), the cash market will have a difficult time sustaining this week’s rally Wednesday.

In spite of mostly moderate temperatures in the East, a Gulf Coast trader reported not seeing any decrease in demand on the pipes that her company trades. “The market’s still there,” she said. While acknowledging the modest screen support for Tuesday’s cash numbers, the trader didn’t think heating load, even in the chilling Midcontinent and Midwest, was substantial enough to justify the general advance.

It might be related to storage strategies again, she said. In the past few weeks traders have sometime marveled that super-frigid forecasts for the next day in the northern market areas were unable to keep most prices from falling, and the idea then was that high confidence levels on storage inventories prompted buyers to replace new spot gas purchases with storage withdrawals as much as possible.

Now a new dynamic may be in effect, the trader said. She thinks more people could be following the suggestion of a Midcontinent producer last week (see Daily GPI, Feb. 4) — now that storage holders have opened a sizeable space in their storage accounts by pulling gas during the cold periods that was bought last summer at $10 or more in many cases, the economics might be right for replacing that storage at much cheaper prices. After all, she said, some analysts think natural gas futures may be in the area of a bottom currently, and that could hold true for the cash market as well.

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