Looks

It looks like bears are roaming the market woods for the holidayseason, said a producer noting new softness in both futures andcash prices Friday. No nay-sayers to her assessment could be foundas sources agreed that weather and storage fundamentals continue tolook weak for the foreseeable future, barring a surprise blizzardor two. A marketer said he “wouldn’t be surprised if we end up withDecember indexes looking a lot like November’s.”

Prices continued to weaken at nearly all points Tuesday in boththe incremental and October bidweek markets. Offshore supplies wereslow in returning from hurricane-related outages, but tradersseemed to discount that factor and to depend on abundant gaselsewhere to take up the slack. They also observed that weather andstorage fundamentals remain weak.

If you thought a new pooling system on El Paso Natural Gas wouldbe approved in time for summer vacation, it looks like you may haveto sweat it out for another season. After months of hair pullingscrutiny and debate, FERC has decided to reject El Paso’s March 16filing for scheduling gas pooling transactions on its system andconvene yet another technical conference on the complex matter.

Looking ahead to what might be the defining issues for his nextterm if his renomination is approved by the Senate, CommissionerWilliam L. Massey focused on FERC’s pipeline certification process,its offshore policy, the issues contained in the gas policy optionspaper – which so far have not been made public – and on ISOs on theelectric side. He said the Commission probably will act on the gaspolicy options paper with a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking withinthe next few weeks.