Going

Sometimes what goes down keeps going down. That would appear to be true of natural gas prices. Wednesday analysts at Goldman Sachs cut their 2011 New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) gas price forecast to $4/MMBtu from $5.25/MMBtu. And just a day earlier Barclays Capital analysts were asking “Who stepped on my forward curve?”

Natural gas explorers that hope to tap into Quebec’s emerging Utica Shale and St. Lawrence River lowlands face more scrutiny going forward, Environment Minister Pierre Arcand said last week.

Natural gas explorers that hope to tap into Quebec’s emerging Utica Shale and St. Lawrence River lowlands face more scrutiny going forward, Environment Minister Pierre Arcand said Monday.

Questions are mounting regarding Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s (PG&E) overall maintenance and repair of its natural gas transmission pipeline system going into the second week of investigation following the pipeline blast that killed at least four people, leveled or badly damaged up to 50 homes and devastated a wider area of more than 300 homes that were evacuated for days following the Sept. 9 tragedy (see Daily GPI, Sept. 13).

The strong rise of 18.8 cents by October futures going into the holiday weekend was about the only rationale for higher prices in most of the cash market Tuesday as weather fundamentals were decidedly mild for early September in most areas.

With the slow start to the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season forcing some forecasting services to recalibrate their expectations going forward, WSI Corp. on Tuesday said it is lowering its expectations from 20 named storms to 19, while keeping its prediction that there will be 11 hurricanes and five intense hurricanes, signified as Category 3 or greater.

Heat levels would keep reaching the low 90s to 110 area Tuesday in the southern third of the U.S., but that failed to keep the weekend’s price gains going Monday. Otherwise, peak temperatures were forecast to be limited to the 80s in most other areas outside the south end of the Northeast.

Pacific Gas and Electric kept a systemwide Stage 2 high-inventory OFO going into at least its fourth day Saturday but loosened the tolerance for positive daily imbalances slightly from 5% to 8%.

After projecting earlier that linepack on its California Gas Transmission system might exceed maximum target levels going into the weekend, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) issued a systemwide Stage 2 high-inventory OFO for Saturday. Penalties of $1/Dth were set for exceeding a relatively lenient (at least for PG&E) tolerance of 20% on positive daily imbalances.