Everywhere

Temperatures mild to cool virtually everywhere, but heating load remains fairly scarce.

Natural gas and oil drilling shouldn’t be “anywhere and everywhere,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said last Wednesday as he launched an ambitious reform of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to improve onshore land, water and habitat protections and to reduce a sharp increase in protests and litigation. However, the changes, officials admitted, are likely to stall new onshore development plans across the country.

Backed by a belief that natural gas and oil drilling shouldn’t be “anywhere and everywhere,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday launched an ambitious reform of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to improve onshore land, water and habitat protections and to reduce a sharp increase in protests and litigation, but the changes, officials admitted, are likely to stall new onshore development plans across the country.

Following major spikes everywhere to open the trading week, the market was mixed Tuesday but dominated by mostly mild softness. A 34.4-cent giveback by December futures Monday proved more influential to cash traders than the prospects of increasing cold weather later this week.

Soaring citygate numbers in the Northeast, where a major Nor’easter was forecast to develop during the weekend, ran against the grain of falling prices everywhere else Friday. Weather moderation was expected to begin in some areas early this week, and a prior-day 21.5-cent decline by January futures along with the decline of industrial load that occurs during a weekend contributed further negative guidance for Friday’s cash market.

Only large rallies at Rockies points avoided double-digit losses across the board everywhere else Tuesday as the cash market further softened in response to cooling load declines not being offset by comparable gains in heating load. The previous day’s 15-cent decline by November futures applied additional downward pressure on the cash market.

Although continuing moderate weather almost everywhere outside the mountain areas of the West and bearish expectations of another subpar storage pull made it seem unlikely, the cash market achieved gains Wednesday at all but two points. One source could only speculate that there must have been some storage-futures spread purchases in play because he saw little serious heating load for Thursday except in parts of the West, Upper Plains and northern New England.

Forecasts of fairly pleasant early-fall weather virtually everywhere outside the southern edge of the U.S., coupled with reports that the damage to oil and gas infrastructure caused by Hurricane Rita wasn’t as bad as what had been expected, led to sharp price drops across the board Monday that were mostly in triple digits.

With Rita fast approaching Gulf of Mexico infrastructure, gas production shut-ins rising rapidly and many traders in transit, the cash market was extremely volatile and illiquid on Thursday. Trading appeared to completely dry up at many locations. Some Northeast averages were more than $5 away from others. Most western locations fell 25-60 cents.