After slowing down considerably on Tuesday, this week’s bull market resumed its headlong charge with the exception of a Rockies retreat that a couple of NGI sources had anticipated. Non-Rockies quotes mostly saw double-digit increases between about a dime and a quarter, with the bigger gains tending to cluster in Appalachia and the Northeast.

The Rockies nearly mirrored the overall market’s price movement range, but on the negative instead of the positive side. Regional declines were generally between a dime and 20 cents. Referring to Opal’s drop of 20 cents, a western trader said, “Cheyenne Hub went high on Tuesday, and I guess the Rockies got a little overheated. Some traders may have panicked a little, pushing prices higher to cover their positions,” and then found demand wasn’t strong enough to sustain those price levels Wednesday.

A Gulf Coast source reflected the outlook for many eastern traders when he said to look for continued price firmness Thursday. Frigid weather in northern market areas, which has struck quite a few as being much more appropriate for Thanksgiving or even Christmas instead of the period leading up to Halloween, will still be around and just starting to invade the South, he noted. Also, cash will feed off the strength of December futures in its first day as prompt month Wednesday, he predicted. (Natural gas futures rose nearly 13 cents; the heating oil contract also recorded a substantial gain, while crude oil fell a small amount.)

Northern Natural Gas gave shippers a Halloween trick, not a treat, in issuing a System Overrun Limitation for Thursday (see Transportation Notes), a Midwest utility buyer observed wryly.

A marketer who did all of his production-area deals on Florida Gas Transmission in Zone 3 said he thinks many FGT traders have become leery of Zone 1 business because of recent on-and-off MOPS outages (see Transportation Notes) along with other constraints in South Texas.

A Southwest utility buyer said that with high temperatures approaching only 80 degrees, there was not all that much air conditioning load in his service territory, but rising wholesale power prices in the West were creating plenty of generation demand for selling into other markets.

A producer believes that Northeast gas prices in the $5.00-20 area will be capped by fuel switching among dual-fuel burners looking to take advantage of recently falling crude oil prices. “Right now, demand is not strong enough that dual-fuel burners need to burn natural gas,” he said. “Of course, if December rolls around and temperatures are still 10 degrees below normal, natural gas will be required and the price ceiling will be considerably higher.”

Naturally the storage guessing game was as popular as ever with the traditional injection season drawing near its close. Many predictions centered around a 10-15 Bcf range. But a marketer said Wednesday he wouldn’t be surprised if the EIA report “came in even lower, flat even. We could easily see a withdrawal this week and an injection in two weeks. Injections are common into mid-November, since it’s all weather/price-dependent. But right now it is cold, so traders won’t mind pulling out a little early against these prices. The back half of the winter season, on the other hand, is another issue.

Month-ending convergence with bidweek pricing was not very good for a western trader who reported a San Juan-Bondad purchase for November at $3.10, about 30 cents below his swing average for the point Wednesday.

A Northeast source said Transco Zone 6 non-New York City traded at a premium to Texas Eastern M-3 because people were taking non-NYC supply and selling it into Big Apple markets as much as they could. Come winter, though, transport restrictions will make that more difficult, he said. The source expects storage reports this winter to feature few surprises. “With fewer storage middlemen left in the marketplace, there is less likelihood that utilities will get fancy with cycling storage. Instead, they should be happy to stick with the basics and draw down storage somewhat irrespective of the prevailing price level.”

A California trader found the bidweek market fairly consistent, saying his SoCal border numbers didn’t move much until Tuesday’s expiration of the futures contract, which is when he finished November deals at that point. However, production area prices were a bit more volatile, he said, reporting buying two Bondad packages five minutes apart and paying a dime more for the second one. “A lot of traders didn’t want to jump into the bidweek early because prices are high,” he added. “If traders hesitate, and two days later prices still haven’t come down, they are in a world of hurt.”

An industrial end-user said he continued to index all of his purchases for November, but said prices were “looking pretty strong.” So many major traders have disappeared in the last year “that we’re only dealing with a handful of suppliers now,” he added. “That hurts us on liquidity, but it can’t be helped.”

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