Conspicuous

In sharp contrast to falling prices in all other areas,Northeast citygates were moving higher Tuesday. By far the mostdazzling performance came from Transco deliveries into New YorkCity that spiked by about a dollar above $4, much as they had onNov. 30. Unlike the end of November, when Transco Zone 6-NYC quotespeaked at $4.75, Tuesday’s top end hit $5.05.

The great majority of the cash market elected to take it easyTuesday, yielding a lot of zeros, ones and twos in the averageprice change column. The only significant price drops of a dime ormore occurred at Northeast citygates, where temperatures abovefreezing were starting to reappear at some points. Transco Zone 6and Texas Eastern M-3 remain the only markets with a considerablecushion of more than a dime from January indexes.

Amid a sea of minor changes elsewhere, deliveries into theChicago and Northeast were conspicuous Wednesday with gains ofaround 15-20 cents or more. A market-area OFO issued by NGPL (seeTransportation Notes) seemed rather innocuous at first by beinglimited to 6 a.m to noon each day, but a marketer said that set offa scramble by traders to adjust their Chicago balancing situations.It also pushed up NGPL Iowa-Illinois Line quotes by more than 20cents. And quotes for Northern Natural-Ventura, where the pipelinehas had a System Overrun Limitation in effect for market zonessince before Christmas (see Daily GPI, Dec. 24), soared by asimilar amount.