Cash prices recorded double-digit increases across the board Friday, having gotten a strong launch from July futures making their prompt-month debut a day earlier with a 31.9-cent spike. The fact that Friday’s trading was for Monday-only flows, omitting the usual market baggage of weekend industrial load loss, was also a bullish factor.

And although it will be largely confined to the South, there should be some increases in power generation demand to handle rising heat levels early this week as The Weather Channel (TWC) predicted Monday highs ranging from the mid 80s to mid 90s regionwide.

Gains of about a dime to nearly half a dollar were pretty evenly distributed among the geographic market areas, although the ones of less than 30 cents tended to be clustered in Western Canada and the Southwest basins.

It appeared for a while that the screen would extend its prior-trading day support for cash quotes through Monday, but the July contract went from positive territory Friday morning to an eventual loss of 12.2 cents in what was attributed to profit-taking (see related story).

Like the South, the Northeast was predicted to see a warming trend as the weekend began, but the Northeast would be rising only to comfortably cool levels before cold fronts arriving Saturday night and Monday prevented any threat of cooling load developing, TWC said. The Midwest forecast was mixed; depending on the location, temperatures would be static, rising slightly or falling slightly. A cold front arriving in the Midwest Sunday was due to leave highs in the 60s and 70s behind, TWC said.

The California coast was due to stay on the cool side, but most of the rest of the West would range from seasonal highs around 100 in the desert Southwest to above-normal peaks in the 80s in the lower elevations of the Pacific Northwest and Rockies. It was looking more springlike in the Alberta cities of Calgary and Edmonton, where Friday’s highs were around 80 and the low 70s, respectively. Edmonton could expect a significant cooldown to the low 60s Saturday, according to the Weather Central forecasting firm, while Calgary was predicted to see a lesser drop into the mid 70s.

Accompanying a price gain of about 35 cents, NGPL-TexOk saw volumes traded at the point on IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) skyrocket from 459,000 MMBtu Thursday (which covered flows through the two weekend days) to a whopping 783,400 MMBtu Friday. It didn’t work that way in all cases, though. Although the SoCal citygate also recorded a strong increase of about 30 cents, its ICE volume of 148,000 MMBtu Friday was actually 53,200 MMBtu less than that of a day earlier.

It was still pretty chilly in the Upper Midwest on Friday but about to start getting warmer, a marketer said. At least it’s starting to look a lot more like spring than it had previously, she said. She couldn’t be sure about it but said some people in the vicinity might still be using their furnaces occasionally, “but not me.”

The marketer said her company “regretted” the upward turn in first-of-month indexes for June, even though they weren’t very big. Her company paid nearly 13 cents more for Consumers Energy deliveries and nearly 15 cents more at the MichCon citygate, she said.

Tropical Depression One (TD1) failed to earn the name of Ana, which is what the first tropical storm of the 2009 hurricane season will be called. It continued to plod northeastward Friday away from North America, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, where it was entering the colder Atlantic waters off New England and Eastern Canada. NHC expected TD1 to begin dissipating around Friday evening and be mostly a memory Saturday morning. It issued its final advisory on the system late Friday afternoon.

Eight drilling rigs departed the U.S. search for natural gas during the week ending May 29, according to the Baker Hughes Rotary Rig Count (https://intelligencepress.com/features/bakerhughes). That left 703 still-active units. The Gulf of Mexico actually gained a rig, but nine were deactivated onshore. The latest Baker Hughes tally is down 5% from a month ago and 52% less than the year-ago level.

June bidweek business on ICE tended to reflect Day 2 (Tuesday) numbers falling a bit from Day 1 (Friday, May 22) and then recovering to some extent on Day 3 (Wednesday) in many instances. Results could vary even on neighboring pipes, though. For example, ANR-Southwest averages ranged between $2.70 and $2.72 for all three days. But CenterPoint-East was more volatile in going from a little more than $2.78 (Day 1) to about $2.71 (Day 2) and rallying to about $2.745 (Day 3).

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