Hints

With hints of rising prices on the horizon, 24 leading natural gas marketers had total transactions of 135.07 Bcf/d in 1Q2011, a 2.49 Bcf/d (1.9%) increase from the 132.58 Bcf/d they transacted in the year-ago period, according to NGI’s 1Q2011 Top North American Gas Marketers Ranking.

It wasn’t a complete upturn, but the hints in the previous day’s market that a lessening of overall weakness might lead to a general rally Thursday came to fruition. Abetted by the May futures increase of 9.2 cents Wednesday and a rather slow easing of cold weather in much of the northern U.S. and Canada, a mixed market saw gains outnumbering losses.

Although most of the market continued to soften Wednesday in trading for the last day of March, there were a couple of hints of latent strength in nearly all of the declines being smaller than the day before and quite a few points, primarily in the Northeast and Rockies but also in a few other scattered locations, were flat to slightly higher.

Hints of an economic turnaround weren’t enough to pull natural gas marketing out of the doldrums during the first three months of this year, according to NGI’s 1Q2010 Top North American Gas Marketers Ranking, which found that the 22 reporting marketers that also participated in the 1Q2009 survey transacted 122.85 Bcf/d in 1Q2010, an increase of less than 1% compared with the 121.87 Bcf/d they reported in the year-ago period. Those same 22 marketers reported a less than 1% decrease in NGI’s 4Q2009 survey compared with the year-ago period.

Hints of an economic turnaround weren’t enough to pull natural gas marketing out of the doldrums during the first three months of this year, according to NGI’s 1Q2010 Top North American Gas Marketers Ranking, which found that the 22 reporting marketers that also participated in the 1Q2009 survey transacted 122.85 Bcf/d in 1Q2010, an increase of less than 1% compared with the 121.87 Bcf/d they reported in the year-ago period. Those same 22 marketers reported a less than 1% decrease in NGI’s 4Q2009 survey compared with the year-ago period.

September natural gas futures rose as traders cited geopolitically derived strength in crude oil and hints of tropical development by a leading forecaster as giving the market a late-week lift. September natural gas rose 27 cents to $9.389 and the October contract tacked on 27 cents as well to finish at $9.494. September crude oil rose $1.02 to $125.10/bbl after trading as high as $128.50.

The September aftermarket opened with cash quotes continuing to move higher at a large majority of points Wednesday, but hints were surfacing that this week’s Hurricane Katrina-inspired bull run may have run its course. A modest recovery from massive offshore production outages had begun, and although the near-term Gulf of Mexico (GOM) supply picture remained murky, there were some perceptions that things might not be as bad as they had appeared as recently as Tuesday.

Swing prices moved lower again Tuesday despite hints that cooling demand will be rising slowly in the next few days. New declines were fairly moderate in the East, ranging from barely lower to just shy of 15 cents, with a majority of points falling less than a dime. Declining weather load caused western markets to record bigger losses from a little under a dime to slightly more than 20 cents.

Modest upticks in cash prices continued to prevail Thursday, but signs of a weakening market were evident. None of the gains were greater than 7-8 cents, and more points were seeing either flatness or lower numbers. The hot weather in the South and West that had lent a modicum of support to Wednesday’s prices was waning a bit, and the 7.2-cent screen gain on Wednesday may have been the only thing averting overall softness Thursday.