In most cases the cash market was giving back Tuesday about as much or more than it had realized in Monday’s gains. Losses ranged from minimal in the Rockies to about 40 cents or so. Those in the range of 10-25 cents were in the majority.

The temperature-sensitive Cheyenne Hub was the rare point achieving a gain of nearly a dime. That and the relatively small declines at other Rockies points were obviously the result of a winter storm in the region dumping snow that The Weather Channel said would require “yardsticks for measurement” in Colorado’s Front Range and adjacent foothills.

A Denver-area source said a few colleagues were unable to get to work Tuesday and the office was shut down early because of the snow, adding, “We’ve got another 10 inches due here by Wednesday.” He noted that heavy snow was penetrating as far south as northern New Mexico, helping raise power load in the Southwest. “One San Juan Basin supplier we’ve been buying from regularly didn’t have anything available today [Tuesday]. He said one of his peaker generating units had been called on to produce,” so the gas was needed to run it instead. Denver was expected to get temperatures in the 40s and sunny skies Thursday, the source said, “so then we’ll have a slushy mess.”

“We’re still warmer than normal,” said a Midwest utility buyer. The winter storm in the Rockies was likely to drift eastward into the Plains states but expected to fizzle out before reaching the Midwest, she went on. The utility continues to inject into storage, something it had begun last week. “After all, you don’t want to sell first-of-month baseload supplies at a big loss,” the buyer said, noting that Chicago citygates in the low $5.20s Tuesday were more than $4 below NGI‘s $9.32 index for March.

The buyer commented on Nymex’s huge plunges of more than $3/bbl and 6 cents/gallon in crude oil and heating oil futures respectively, along with the more moderate decline of nearly 17 cents on the natural gas screen. “That and the lack of weather load in the near term makes it highly likely that prices will soften further Wednesday,” she said.

In the Northeast, a utility buyer said temperatures would be cooling off to around 40 degrees Wednesday, “but we’re not due for any snowstorms like what was still going on” early this month. Because of the warmer weather recently and consequent reduced load, “we’ve started injecting into storage. You have to do something with excess monthly baseload, so it might as well go into storage.” But the buyer added that he didn’t perceive any customers on his system that also were getting early jump on injection season.

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