Prices ranged from essentially flat to down about 15 cents at Malin Monday. Apart from Malin, all other declines were generally a dime or less. Weather fundamentals remained weak in the northern market areas and Tropical Storm Chantal was getting little credence as a serious threat to Gulf of Mexico production for the time being. Those factors and screen weakness accounted for much of the post-weekend cash softening, sources said.

Chantal was a little better organized as it neared the Yucatan Peninsula coast, said the National Weather Service. Tropical storm warnings were posted for the entire coast of Belize and for Mexico’s Caribbean coast as far north as Cancun, while a hurricane watch was in effect from Belize City to Cancun. As of 4 p.m. CDT the storm was about 70 miles east-southeast of Chetumal, Mexico, NWS said.

Chantal can be expected to lose significant strength during its land passage over the Yucatan Peninsula, which was expected to begin Monday night. Once it re-emerges into the Gulf of Mexico, the big question is: Will Chantal have enough get-up-and-go left to get up to the northern Gulf and go about causing production shut-ins?

There’s not a lot of significant air conditioning load outside the southern tier of states for right now, and people aren’t putting much stock in Chantal as a supply disrupter at this point, a Gulf Coast trader said. However, he added, intrastate power generation demand kept South Texas numbers from falling much.

The Texas heat also combined with nuclear unit outages of Comanche Peak 1 in North Texas and Palo Verde 3 in Arizona and an El Paso low-linepack OFO (see Transportation Notes) to generate late run-ups at El Paso-Permian and Waha, an Oklahoma-based marketer said. However, most deals had already been done at lower numbers, so both points averaged slightly softer for the day, he added. The Palo Verde nuke was at 4% power Monday and ramping back up, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Comanche Peak unit went to hot shutdown Saturday and remained at zero power Monday, so the prognosis for its return was uncertain.

The intra-Alberta market started the morning higher in the low C$3.90s, a Calgary source said, but followed its usual trend in falling about a dime in near-lockstep with the screen.

The Palo Verde nuke outage and El Paso OFO were meaningful to western traders “but not that big a deal in the overall scheme of the market,” a marketer said. “There’s still plenty of power and gas available out there.” A Rockies trader said Opal barely budged from the low $2.60s all morning.

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