It was a wild ride Wednesday in swing trading for the last day of September. All points spiked by amounts ranging from about 30 cents to nearly a dollar, with a heavy majority up 60 cents or more, in a market driven largely by a screen that soared nearly half a dollar Tuesday and was up by almost 90 cents at one point Wednesday morning before retreating in sympathy with falling oil futures.

It was instances of $50-plus crude oil futures Monday and Tuesday that provided much of the impetus for gas rallies Tuesday and Wednesday both at Nymex and in the physical market. However, gas numbers also got support this week as it became apparent that Gulf of Mexico shut-ins related to Hurricane Ivan would remain substantial and be more persistent than first expected.

In addition, despite bearish near-term weather forecasts, a couple of consulting firms may have given an extra boost to the gas commodity by saying Wednesday they expect relatively rapid arrivals of winter-type conditions. In their 30/90-day forecast, AccuWeather.com meteorologists said winter could get an early start in the Great Plains, Great Lakes and Northeast with below normal temperatures likely in the October-December time frame (see details in related story).

And Weather 2000, while acknowledging that summer’s “last hurrah could continue through October for parts of the East,” said its warnings from the summer remain unchanged: “that a rapid transition from ‘summer to winter’ will take place in 2004.” That obviously doesn’t mean a changeover in a day, Weather 2000 continued, but a typical three-month calendar autumn could easily turn into a brisk transition of four to six weeks, similar to the shift it saw going from winter to summer earlier this year. It expects the “early winter” situation to show up first in the Rockies and then shift gradually eastward through the Midcontinent to the East.

Finally, even though virtually the entire industry still believes that storage inventories will end the injection season at ample levels, the near-term outlook isn’t quite as comfortable as before. Some traders have assessed the prospects for large volumes Hurricane Ivan-caused offshore shut-ins lingering for an extended period and concluded that the Energy Information Administration may report injections substantially below expectations Thursday morning and possibly for a ways into October, one source said.

The speed of restoring offline Gulf of Mexico production picked up a bit, but not by much. Minerals Management Service, citing reports received from 22 companies by 11:30 a.m., said 2,321.96 MMcf/d remained offline Wednesday — a gain of a little more than 18 MMcf/d from the day before.

A news story said Shell Oil still had three major platform complexes (Ram-Powell, Cognac and Main Pass 252) totally shut down and no estimates of when their production might return.

Florida Gas Transmission Zones 2 and 3 in the production area continued to record some of the cash market’s highest numbers, with a Zone 3 quote of $7.40 Wednesday easily topping all other points. A Florida utility buyer said her staff was “puzzled ourselves” over why. The only possibilities they could think of were first, that FGT was in the second day of relatively tight 5% imbalance tolerance in its Overage Alert Day notice, and second, that maybe FGT is one of the harder-hit Gulf Coast pipes when it comes to offshore shut-ins staying high this week or has interconnect deliveries from other pipes falling short of normal.

The West was in the midst of the overall run-up Wednesday instead of having some of the smallest increases as on Tuesday. That was partly due to PG&E’s lifting a high-linepack OFO. Also, power generation demand got a shot in the arm as Duke Energy returned its natural gas-fired 755 MW Moss Landing 7 unit in California to service early Wednesday, according to a report by the California Independent System Operator.

Generally pleasant autumn weather, with a few areas of moderate chill, will pervade most of the U.S. Thursday, The Weather Channel said.

He was not sure if it’s permanent or not, but one source perceived that “all the bearish sentiment in the last few weeks over high storage levels and mild weather” seems to have reversed in the last couple of days.

There were “huge increases” again in October prices as the screen’s strength increased (the new prompt-month November contract was up 56.0 cents to $6.91), a western marketer said. For example, she reported paying $5.03 at Waha Tuesday, while prices there were on either side of $5.50 Wednesday. The marketer also reported Northern Natural-demarc ranging from the high $5.40s to around $5.60. She thought some people had attributed all of the gas market run-up Tuesday to crude oil strength and didn’t think October gas would have any staying power, “so they shorted the bidweek market” in hopes of prices coming off again, but then had to pay up for that mistake Wednesday. Her usual customers were asking for a lot of October baseload, so she assumed that they’re expecting a fairly strong aftermarket.

Not so for an East Coast utility buyer. “We’re not buying any October baseload” and will swing through the month instead, she said Wednesday.

An industrial end-user said he bought his October supplies, all at index, early in bidweek this time, which turned out to be a good thing for him. He said he was able to make early purchases at the Chicago citygate at NGI‘s index minus 3.5 cents, before Tuesday’s big rebound turned index-negative deals into index-positive ones.

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