All points joined Monday in rebounding from weekend softness, but except for sizable transportation constraint-linked gains of 30 cents or so at the Southern California border, San Juan Basin and the Rockies, other advances were more moderate at about 15 cents or less.

Outside of air conditioners being pushed by heat across the southern tier of states, weather fundamentals had relatively little influence on cash quotes. Most of the northern half of the U.S. is experiencing highs currently in the 60s and 70s, which doesn’t require much gas for either heating or cooling, a Midwestern marketer said.

“Other than the roller-coaster ride in futures this [Monday] morning, it was a pretty quiet market,” the marketer continued. He had heard that the screen spiked early on rumors about necessary repairs possibly extending the refueling outage of an AEP nuclear unit in Michigan, but that later Nymex traders dismissed it as “not such bad news after all” when the operator said it expected to make the repairs within the scheduled refueling period (see story in Power Market Today). Apparently it was a false alarm since the screen made a major retreat in 10 minutes, he said.

Because of the energy futures weakness (the June gas contract eventually lost 10.7 cents on the day, while crude oil and heating oil also fell with crude winding up below $28/bbl again) and the fact that a dearth of weather load is expected to continue in most areas, the marketer and others anticipate what he called a “big correction” in cash numbers Tuesday. Prices probably will be giving back all of Monday’s gains and maybe more, one source said.

Although a Gulf Coast trader reported seeing moderate upticks in late deals, he counted himself among those expecting softer prices Tuesday “unless there’s a big resurgence of the screen, and it would have to go a long way to have any effect.”

“I’m pretty sure that [Florida Gas Transmission] will have an Overage Alert Day Tuesday,” a Florida utility buyer said after the pipeline cautioned market-area customers for the third time this spring of a possible OAD (see Transportation Notes). The first advisory yielded nothing, but another on May 5 was followed by an OAD the next day that lasted eight days. The FGT shipper meeting last week in Naples, FL was pretty routine, the buyer said, adding that she was unaware of any significant disagreements between the pipeline and its customers.

Although much of the western market was about as mild as the East, some segments responded to maintenance restrictions on transport, one trader said. She observed that Transwestern had shifted its work on the San Juan Lateral, along with a large capacity cut, to the Blanco-Thoreau segment over the weekend. That cut off some supplies in the upstream portion of the basin, she said, but lent a premium to other San Juan gas and also allowed more Rockies gas to be able to reach El Paso for passage to California.

Supply at the California border was obviously in demand, judging by price gains there being among Monday’s biggest. The trader noted that a two-day suspension of Transwestern deliveries at Needles, which she estimated at about 850 MMcf/d, will occur Tuesday and Wednesday as Transwestern takes its upstream mainline out of service for inspections.

Markets related to Canadian supplies were much quieter than usual with many north-of-the-border traders taking Monday off as the Victoria Day holiday.

As one source helpfully pointed out, the official start of the 2003 hurricane season is now less than two weeks away.

Analyst Thomas Driscoll of Lehman Brothers forecast that EIA will report a storage injection of 95 Bcf for the week ended May 16. At Citigroup, Kyle Cooper said his final estimation is for a build between 78 and 88 Bcf.

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