Chilly

A chilly warning that sponsors of Canada’s northern pipeline posted to their stockholders in May, during the 2012 spring round of corporate annual meetings, has turned out to be true: do not expect any government to rescue the frozen scheme, said Imperial Oil Ltd., senior partner in the Mackenzie Gas Project (MGP).

Battered by negative influences seeming to come from all directions — mostly mild to chilly (but not particularly cold) weather, weak prior-day futures, storage injection capacity growing ever tighter and any tropical storm threat to Gulf of Mexico production deemed unlikely for the rest of the season — the cash market fell at nearly all points Thursday.

Although temperatures are rising in much of the West, they were diminishing in sections of the South, and despite chilly conditions lingering for at least another day or so in the Midwest, the region is due to see a warming trend toward the weekend. The modestly bearish weather influences, which reversed marginal support for Tuesday’s cash market, combined with the 3.1-cent fall by October futures Tuesday to drive quotes lower at a large majority of points Wednesday.

Prices rebounded at nearly all points Monday, even with weather forecasts being mostly mild to chilly in northern market areas and merely warm — but not especially hot except from Texas through parts of the desert Southwest — in the southern U.S. The previous Thursday’s futures gain of 10.2 cents and returning industrial demand after a holiday weekend were chiefly responsible for the overall firmness.

Only a couple of points saw losses Tuesday as the cash market continued a broad overall advance. Cold to chilly forecasts for Wednesday — with freezing lows due in some locations — stretched from Western Canada and much of the western U.S. through the Plains and Midwest into the Northeast. Cash got an extra boost from Monday’s May futures increase of 6.7 cents, and there likely was a small amount of run-up in cooling load in the South, where highs from the mid 70s to mid 80s were predicted for much of the region.

Chilly temperatures kept upward pressure on a vast majority of cash point averages on Tuesday except for a handful of Northeast points, which recorded drops of $2.20 to more than $5 as the coldest temperatures associated with Sunday’s blizzard began to subside.

The natural gas market made it four in a row Thursday as prior-day screen support and chilly temperatures in a number of regions around the country led to cash point increases at a vast majority of locations.

The head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) last Thursday took Wall Street to task for its chilly response to calls for reform of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market that has been proposed by Congress in its sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system.

With another dose of winter storms and chilly temperatures for much of the country set for later in the week, January natural gas futures — which expire on Tuesday — rebounded on Monday to put a six in front of a prompt-month contract’s price for the first time in almost a year. The contract notched a $6 high in afternoon trading before closing out the regular session at $5.990, up 34.7 cents from last Thursday’s close.