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After etching out its daily trading range during the first 45minutes Friday, natural gas futures limped lazily sideways for therest of the session, as traders elected to stay mostly on thesidelines ahead of the 4-day holiday weekend. The August contractfinished 5.3 cents stronger at $4.476 in a session that saw lessthan 40,000 contracts change hands.

Those who had expected cash bullishness to continue Wednesday,based on the July futures contract’s move to previously unknownheights on the previous day, were in for a big disappointment.Wednesday’s screen achieved most of its drastic downturn while cashwas still trading. And while hot weather remained fairly severe onthe West Coast, it cooled off considerably in the Northeast.

Florida Gas Transmission lifted an Overage Alert Day notice (seeDaily GPI, May 25) for its market areaWednesday, but said it will continue to monitor hourly and dailytakes.

The optimists are turning out to be right as Canadian naturalgas exports to the United States continue to climb, laying to restpessimistic productivity forecasts a year ago.

Florida Gas Transmission lifted an Overage Alert Day notice (seeDaily GPI, May 25) for its market areaWednesday, but said it will continue to monitor hourly and dailytakes.

The optimists are turning out to be right as Canadian naturalgas exports to the United States continue to climb, laying to restpessimistic productivity forecasts a year ago.

Florida Gas Transmission lifted an Overage Alert Day Noticeaffecting its market area (see Daily GPI, May 4) for Thursday’s gas day, but warnedit will continue monitoring hourly and daily takes to ensure thatsystem integrity is maintained.

The future of merchant power will be inhibited unless there arenew approaches and new perceptions about the technical, economicand political approaches applied, according to a panel of expertsat GasMart/Power 2000 Tuesday in Denver. Regardless of what preciseindustry changes are made, not all of the proposed new power plantswill get built, and distributed generation ultimately will have toplay a role to satisfy the expected growing demand that equates toabout 5 Tcf of added gas over the next 10 years, according topanelists discussing “The Runaway World of Merchant Power.”

Congestion is about a $100 to $200 million problem in thePennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland (PJM) independent system operator(ISO) area, but it is being addressed through a combination ofmanagement and capital improvement steps that include a long listof natural gas-fired new generating plants, according to anexecutive with the PJM ISO’s regional power district, the largestin the nation.