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Southern Union Co. is seeing its dance card beginning to fill up after Williams arrived late Thursday bearing a more lucrative merger package than one offered earlier this month by Energy Transfer Equity LP (ETE).

The shale industry might need to go on the offensive against its critics, the head of an advocacy group told an audience in Pittsburgh Tuesday.

There didn’t seem to be enough weather-based demand — for either heating or cooling — to justify it, but prices were up fairly strongly across the board Monday. The cash market did derive minor support from the previous Friday’s 5.2-cent uptick by June futures and the restoration of industrial load from its usual weekend decline.

As expected, the loss of quite a bit of cooling demand from earlier in the week with almost-negligible replacement by new heating load didn’t allow Wednesday’s overall minor gains to persist. Instead, cash prices fell almost the board Thursday. The June futures drop of 6.5 cents a day earlier was another bearish factor in Thursday’s market.

A federal judge ruled last week that Pennsylvania landowners who signed Marcellus Shale leases with oil and gas companies — then unsuccessfully sued to have them nullified — did not “repudiate” the lease terms, and turned down the companies’ counter suit to extend the leases by two years to regain time lost during litigation.

The price rally that had begun Monday didn’t reverse entirely but appeared to be losing some steam Wednesday. More than a few points were able to extend previous gains by small amounts, but even more were faltering due to declining heating load in some areas and the previous day’s downturn of 6.3 cents by April futures.

Icy weather forecasts for Thursday extending into parts of the South didn’t seem to impress the cash market Wednesday as it recorded losses at all but one point (a flat Sumas), including multi-dollar declines at some Northeast points that had continued to soar a day earlier, and a whopping $11-plus plummet at the Florida citygate.

Chevron Corp. CEO John Watson said Thursday the buy-out of Marcellus Shale player Atlas Energy Inc. didn’t signal a fundamental shift in the company’s strategy; rather, it was an attractive opportunity that came at the right time.

Prices didn’t have much to work with as far as imminent heating load Monday, but traders may have been looking down the road a ways at the colder weather that is expected to be prevalent going into the weekend. The cash market also had prior-trading-day screen support Monday from the 8.1-cent rise by December futures Friday, and it will have even more Tuesday after the prompt-month contract advanced by another 15.1 cents (see related story).