Pummeled by a prior-day futures plunge and losing both heating and cooling load, cash prices recorded losses at all points Wednesday.

Declines ranged from about a nickel to about 60 cents and were fairly evenly spread among the various geographic market areas. Only the Florida citygate fell less than a dime.

The Florida citygate and Florida Gas Transmission’s (FGT) three production-area zones all softened despite the pipeline keeping an Overage Alert Day in place Wednesday and highs in the 80s remaining in Thursday’s forecast for the Sunshine State.

FGT’s restriction may have stuck around, but others were ending as quickly as they appeared. PG&E and MRT allowed their respective low-inventory OFO and System Protection Warning to be in effect for Wednesday only.

Except for Florida and the region’s western half, the warm weather that had been creating some air conditioning load in the South is rapidly becoming only a memory. Atlanta’s high of 70 Wednesday is forecast to fall to the mid 60s Thursday, while Charlotte, NC, will go from around 63 to the mid 50s, according to Madison, WI-based Weather Central.

The Northeast will see relatively little change in temperatures Thursday but continue to peak in the 50s for the most part, while a warming trend will continue in the Midwest.

Western numbers dropped despite a quick return to colder weather in the Rockies after a brief warm-up. Denver, which had seen peak temperatures shoot up from 45 degrees Tuesday to around 57 Wednesday, can expect a dive to the 42-degree area Thursday, Weather Central said. A slight warming trend in the Pacific Northwest partially offset the colder forecast for the Rockies.

It’s “still a little on the cool side” in the Calgary area, said a local producer, but conditions should be more like normal in the coming week. Even though the May futures rebound of 10.8 cents Wednesday wasn’t especially big, the contract achieved such a large comeback from its low point (see related story) that the producer said he thinks it will help inspire a moderate cash market rally Thursday. He also expects the mid-morning storage report to provide an extra price boost, since it’s universally expected to be another withdrawal that will further erode, if not erase the year-on-five-year average surplus.

Despite Wednesday’s softness, the producer reported still seeing “a fair amount” of weather-related demand on the West Coast. This should be an excellent hydroelectricity year in the West, he added, because extended cold has kept the region’s snowpack from melting early.

The producer said he expect to see bigger volumes going into California from the Southwest basins in coming months as Rockies gas tends to shift more toward eastern markets. Unless there’s another delay, Rockies Express (REX) will open its interconnect with Panhandle Eastern in Missouri near the end of April, further increasing eastbound Rockies transportation capacity, he said.

“Spring’s not here yet, but you can see it coming,” commented a Midwest utility buyer. “Bring it on,” he added, because as recently as Tuesday morning his company’s service still had snow coming down. He said he’s been too busy with other matters to initiate any Rockies gas deliveries to the utility via REX. He couldn’t do it on Northern Natural Gas anyway because that interconnect is full (see Transportation Notes), but moving the Rockies supply into NGPL and/or ANR is a possibility, he said.

The National Weather Service predicts above-normal temperatures during the April 7-11 workweek everywhere east of a line running northeastward from southeast Arizona to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The agency looks for below-normal readings everywhere west of a line from southeast California to the western halves of the Dakotas.

Citigroup analyst Tim Evans expects storage withdrawals of 35 Bcf and 25 Bcf for the weeks ending March 28 and April 4, respectively. Looking further ahead, he projects the first net injection of the year (25 Bcf) in the week ending April 11.

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