Prices rose across the board Tuesday based on a screen spike of nearly 33 cents the day before and still substantive (but dwindling) air conditioning load. Upticks ranging from nearly a dime to a little more than 40 cents were distributed fairly evenly among the various market regions, although California quotes tended to see the smallest increases.

Only the PG&E citygate and the Southern California border into PG&E’s system failed to record double-digit gains. The giant dual utility did not declare an OFO, but did project that linepack would be rising above maximum target levels by Thursday.

There was some doubt about whether the cash market could continue its mostly rising streak this week through Wednesday. A marketer called Wednesday’s pricing a toss-up, but others indicated that a loss of futures support (the natural gas screen dropped 3.2 cents Tuesday, accompanied by moderate declines in Nymex’s petroleum product offerings) and moderating trends in Northeast and Midwest temperatures that were due to be under way by Wednesday would lead to lower physical prices.

The Chicago citygate started strongly but retreated in later quotes, which often signals next-day softness, said a Calgary-based producer. “Eventually we had a lot of offers looking for bids,” he said. Chicago-area highs that had been near 90 degrees as the week began were dropping into the low 80s Tuesday and expected to decline another 10 degrees or so Wednesday, he noted. Such a fast-paced cooling period was reflected in having a lot of gas-fired power generation shutting off in the Lower Midwest. Cooler temperatures are expected to remain in effect for the rest of this week, but the area should be getting hot again next week, the producer said. It’s been “cold and rainy” in the Calgary area lately, he commented.

A Gulf Coast marketer had no doubt about falling prices Wednesday, saying he was surprised that the market had so much firmness still left in it Tuesday. He said a cooldown that would result in parts of the Northeast seeing highs down into the 60s and 70s Wednesday, combined with Tuesday’s slightly negative screen, should be sufficient to take prices lower. Tropical Storm Arlene-related offshore production losses were in the past Tuesday as far as gas traders were concerned, he said.

The marketer was still seeing some fair power generation load in the South, but said it would require a much larger geographic area in the rest of the U.S. to get hot for an extended period to rally prices again.

The fuel buyer for a Northeast utility said his company made no purchases Tuesday “because we didn’t like the continuing run-up” in prices. He said he kept hearing that natural gas futures soared Monday mostly due to oil’s influence, but it seemed that the weakness in gas market fundamentals such as storage should have prevented that somewhat. He welcomed the region’s cooling off from early-week heat levels as a potential price depressant. “We’re doing fine on storage,” he said, so the company doesn’t necessarily have to buy every day for injections if it thinks prices are too high, and can fall back on baseload supplies instead.

As expected, the lion’s share of Gulf of Mexico (GOM) production that had been shut in while Tropical Storm Arlene approached was being restored Monday. In its final report on Arlene-related evacuation and shut-in statistics, Minerals Management Service (MMS) said it counted a total of 59 MMcf/d still offline as of 11:30 a.m. CDT Tuesday in reports by four companies. It said 5,686 bbl/d of oil also remained shut in, and only one platform was still evacuated. The cumulative loss of gas production since last Friday had reached 3.428 Bcf, or about 0.087% of the GOM’s approximately 3.94 Tcf of annual output, MMS said.

The National Weather Service (NWS) expects above normal temperatures in a large chunk of the U.S. midsection during the June 20-24 workweek. More specifically, it looks for the warmer than usual conditions east of a vertical line from eastern Montana to the Arizona-New Mexico border and west of a line curving southwestward from lower New England through the Mid-Atlantic states into central Arkansas and East Texas. The NWS forecast calls for below normal temperatures south and east of a line from the southeastern corner of Virginia through western North Carolina and along the northern edges of Georgia and Alabama into central Mississippi and South Louisiana. It also predicted below normal readings everywhere west of a line from western Montana to central Arizona.

Citigroup analyst Kyle Cooper said his final estimation of the storage report for the week ending June 10 calls for a build of 74-84 Bcf. His counterpart at Lehman Brothers, Thomas Driscoll, had a substantially larger prediction of a 100 Bcf injection.

A cluster of thunderstorms and showers in the central Caribbean Sea continued to be monitored for signs of organization, but so far that has not happened and it now appears that any strengthening of the system would be rather slow, The Weather Channel said. Any potential threat was receding after a Hurricane Hunter mission to investigate the area Tuesday afternoon was canceled.

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