Widespread hot weather, a major production outage in the Gulf of Mexico and prior-day screen support were unable to arouse most of the cash market out of its recent swoon Wednesday.

Several flat to about a dime higher points were able to avoid the softness that pervaded the rest of the market, where losses ranged from a little less than a nickel to a little more than 40 cents. As they have been often in recent trading, the West and Midcontinent were where most of the largest drops occurred. Northeast citygates saw most of the smallest declines and modest gains as New York City and Philadelphia were slated to have peak temperatures on either side of 90 Thursday.

Natural gas futures extended their string of support for next-day cash numbers to three trading sessions as the September contract made its prompt-month debut with a gain of 11.8 cents. It spent the morning in moderately negative territory before getting swept up by spikes in Nymex’s petroleum-based offerings (see related story).

Highs in the central section of the South were due to subside further Thursday from the triple-digit marks they had reached Tuesday. The forecast for the rest of the region called for little change in heat levels.

The Midwest will see a hodgepodge of temperature changes Thursday. According to Madison, WI-based Weather Central, the high for Des Moines, IA, will rise from 87 Wednesday to the low 90s, while Detroit will see a drop of about the same amount (from 89 to the mid 80s) and Chicago should remain relatively unchanged around 89.

The Rockies/San Juan market continued to record big losses in spite of very hot weather (Denver was expected to peak in the high 90s Thursday while Phoenix will rise slightly to around 110). One slightly bearish development was that Kern River reported it had returned to normal linepack systemwide after being low Monday and Tuesday.

Florida Gas Transmission’s issuance of an Overage Alert Day (see Transportation Notes) resulted in a Florida citygate gain of nearly a dime and flat quotes at Florida Gas Zone 3. However, Zones 1 and 2 continued to soften.

An outage of about four days at the offshore Independence Hub platform, which had been postponed from last week due to inclement weather, began around 9 p.m. CDT Tuesday, said Rick Rainey, spokesman for majority hub owner Enterprise Products Partners. That took an estimated 850-900 MMcf/d off the Gulf Coast market until the weekend.

A Texas-based marketer said he couldn’t figure out the reason for oil’s big jump, since the Wednesday morning inventory report seemed neutral for the most part. There is a major heat wave due in most of the U.S. by the weekend, he noted, but he expects Thursday cash prices to be up about 30 cents more because of Wednesday’s screen support than the anticipated jump in cooling load. The heat should ensure that there will be little, if any, falloff in the cash market Friday, he said.

The marketer said Gulf Coast prices are seeing little impact from the Independence Hub outage other than Tennessee’s 500 Line trading “at a premium to where it should be.” The 500 Line should be going back to normal soon as the hub will be ramping back up production this weekend, he added. (The 500 Line is where Independence output is delivered onshore in South Louisiana. Tennessee’s 500 and 800 Lines were trading at virtual parity at the end of last week, but the 500 Line was at an 8-cent premium Tuesday in anticipation of the Independence outage and widened the spread to a little more than a dime Wednesday.)

Thursday’s trading will be for first-of-month flows, and that’s usually pretty volatile, the marketer noted. “People try to get in and get out early [in that situation], and there’s a lot of index trading,” he said.

Very little was still being traded for August baseload Wednesday, he said. All indexes will be plunging since August futures went off the board Tuesday nearly $4 below the July settlement, he said.

An LDC fuel buyer in a West Coast state said since her company doesn’t buy gas for any power generators, it’s a very low-demand period currently.

Barclays Capital Research analysts Michael Zenker and George Hopley said they expect Thursday morning’s storage report to show an injection of 68 Bcf for the week ending July 25.

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