Prices tended to flatten out in most cases Thursday, and severalsources believe that barring any drastic weather changes, themarket is due for more sideways trading for at least the next fewdays.

The overall weather outlook was growing more benign, and amoderately negative screen had little influence on cash, anaggregator said. Several parts of the Northeast are starting towarm above freezing, according to one forecasting service, andalthough a new storm may bring more snow to New England bySaturday, the new system will be considerably weaker.

A large amount of gas could return to the Gulf Coast marketsometime today. A spokesman for a Williams Field Services unit saidit hoped to complete leak repairs on the Tri-States Pipelineliquids system in southern Mississippi (see Daily GPI, March 6)towards dusk Thursday. Integrity testing will be performed afterthat, and the unit’s goal was to get product flowing again bymidnight, he said.

A staffer at Destin Pipeline, which had to shut in about 600MMcf/d of offshore production this week when the BP Amoco-operatedPascagoula Gas Plant suspended operations because of the leak inthe downstream liquids line, said Destin didn’t take nominationsfor today because it couldn’t be sure the plant would be in serviceagain by then. “If Williams does restore the liquids line duringthe night, it’s conceivable we could accept intra-day noms Friday,”he said.

The Southern California border is coming back down to earthafter spiking to above $30 in the early days of March. Some ofThursday’s quotes were more than a dollar less than GPI’s $12.58first-of-month index. The likelihood of any new spikes wasconsidered very low after traders reported that SoCal Gas hadposted a net injection into storage for Wednesday on its bulletinboard. In addition, the injection volume for Thursday was expectedto be even larger, a marketer said. “That tells me there’s unlikelyto be any problem with storage through the rest of withdrawalseason. In fact, I think we may have seen the end of SoCalwithdrawals now that nice weather has settled in.”

The huge disparity in gas values at the California border wasreflected in one western trader’s PG&E-Topock quote at $9.25,more than $3 less than the average of deliveries into the SoCal Gassystem. “Everybody wants to take their gas into SoCal if at allpossible because of the higher netback,” he said. It’s no wonderthat PG&E border numbers are so much lower than for SoCal, headded. PG&E deliveries at the border have to add in-statetransport and still compete with PG&E citygates, which were inthe $9.50 area Thursday.

The Rockies market going forward is looking pretty weak,according to a marketer. Swing pricing was around the mid $4.90s atseveral Rockies points, but rest-of-month deals were running about20 cents below that, he said.

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