Given mild weather, bearish storage levels and the normal slumpin weekend demand, many traders were surprised Friday to see nearlyall Eastern points stay flat or go up as much as 3-4 cents. ThoughGulf Coast numbers were “falling hard” near deadline after startingseveral cents higher, a producer surmised they were being held upat first by “hurricane hype.” Other sources also mentioned that asthe reason for the relative Eastern strength, saying they couldthink of no other explanation.

The hurricane talk certainly was mostly hype as of Friday.Although Tropical Storm Bonnie was north of Puerto Rico andexpected to become a hurricane over the weekend, its movementindicated it would become more of a threat to the Lower and MiddleAtlantic Coast than to the Gulf Coast production area. A Gulftropical depression was bring rain and high wind to the Texas coastFriday afternoon but was not expected to curtail gas supplies.

Columbia-Appalachia gas was trading above CNG and about evenwith Northeast citygates. Continuing curtailments at theinterconnects meant that with TCO, a marketer said, “it’s pool gasat a premium or practically nothing else.”

Prices kept declining in much of the West, with double-digitlosses reported at the Southern California border and PG&Ecitygate. But the big story, according to one trader, was “theAlberta price meltdown.” A marketer reported intra-Alberta deals inthe low C$1.50s, down about C30 cents from Thursday. “We weremostly trying to find some way to get rid of our gas, either byhiding it or parking it, because nobody seemed to want any,” themarketer said. The softness kept going into the late afternoon assources said electronic trading of intra-Alberta gas had fallenfurther into the high C$1.30s. They agreed that the chief reasonfor the price rout was “not enough storage injection capacity to goaround.”

A Southwest trader, saying she was hearing nothing so far aboutSeptember prices, suggested that since it’s a shoulder month,”People are thinking, ‘Let’s not worry it about it yet.'”

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