Hours

Texas Eastern plans minor maintenance for a few hours Thursdaymorning at the Grand Chenier (LA) Station. Operators may experiencehigher than normal pressures on the West Louisiana zone’s CameronSystem, but pressures are expected to return to normal by evening.

What a difference a day can make. Just 27 hours after testingkey support at $2.81, natural gas futures staged a completeturnaround, rallying to its highest daily continuation chartsettlement price this year. Nearly non-existent fundamental factorsgave traders little choice but to rely again on technical tradingtools for price direction. After the May contract posted animpressive gap higher open, that direction was in little doubt. Theprompt contract finished up 6.8 cents at $2.956, just a fraction ofa cent off its $2.96 high and within a nickel of its $3.005all-time high.

NGPL’s High Island Lateral will be out of service for about 12hours of construction Thursday, causing a shutdown of Station 344(Jefferson County, TX). Shippers using the HI 116 Vasgas/NGPL HI 71point will need to nominate half of their normal volumes for thatgas day.

You shouldn’t unless you were one of the thousands of workerswho spent millions of person-hours over the last few years sweatingthe millennium bug out of your company’s systems. If that was you,congratulations; you’ve made this last new year slightly morememorable than Hands Across America Day. Now it’s time for anyfood-hoarding doomsayers to get busy: You’ve got a lot ofstockpiled chips and salsa to get rid of.

You shouldn’t unless you were one of the thousands of workerswho spent millions of person-hours over the last few years sweatingthe millennium bug out of your company’s systems. If that was you,congratulations; you’ve made this last new year slightly morememorable than Hands Across America Day. Now it’s time for anyfood-hoarding doomsayers to get busy: You’ve got a lot ofstockpiled chips and salsa to get rid of.

El Paso will take the Gallup (NM) Station’s B turbine down forsix hours today to calibrate fuel controls. Capacity out of SanJuan Basin will be reduced by 80 MMcf/d for today’s gas day only.

Working into the early hours of Thursday morning, the Pennsylvania General Assembly finally pushed through a statewide gas restructuring bill in the last session before breaking for summer vacation. Under the Natural Gas Choice and Competition Act, gas will become a price-deregulated commodity for residential and small commercial customers in Pennsylvania on Nov. 1. Gov. Tom Ridge, who has already voiced his support for the bill, has 10 days to sign it into law.

Working into the early hours of Thursday morning, thePennsylvania General Assembly finally pushed through a statewidegas restructuring bill in the last session before the assemblybroke for summer vacation. Under the Natural Gas Choice andCompetition Act, gas will become a price-deregulated commodity forresidential and small commercial customers on Nov. 1. Governor TomRidge, who has already voiced his support for the bill, has 10 daysto sign it into law.

Sea Robin told shippers Tuesday it must shut in the entiresystem for 10-12 hours today and asked them to cut their nominationlevels by 50%. The action resulted from being informed by Texaco,operator of the Sea Robin Processing Plant, that the plant musthalt operation to repair a leak. The event constitutes a forcemajeure, Sea Robin said, and thus it declared an OFO Type 30 forthe shutdown period. The pipeline said it had contacted downstreamdelivery point operators and they could not accept gas untreated bythe plant’s dehydration facility.