Negative

After a negative opening and a quick check lower, natural gasfutures battled back Tuesday, as traders gleaned support fromstrength in nearby physical market prices and technical buying inout months. But despite yesterday’s positive price direction, theNovember contract never fully recovered from early its earlysluggishness and finished off 0.5 cents at $3.011. Meanwhile,December and January contracts closed up 2.6 cents and 2.1 cents at$3.148 and $3.158 respectively.

Pacific Gas & Electric issued a low-inventory Stage 1 OFOfor today. It carries penalties of $1/dth for negative dailyimbalances exceeding a relatively stringent 2% tolerance range.

Florida Gas Transmission extended a market-area Overage Alert Daynotice (see Daily GPI, Oct. 13) throughWednesday but loosened the tolerance for daily negative imbalancesfrom 5% to 8%.

After finishing last week with a multi-day Overage Alert Daynotice carrying a 6% tolerance for negative daily imbalances,Florida Gas Transmission reinstated the low-linepack OFO for itsmarket area Tuesday but tightened the tolerance considerably to 2%.The new notice is again due to high market area demand and appliesto the system east of Station 12 (Santa Rosa County, FL).

For the second week in a row, Pacific Gas & Electricdeclared an unusual weekday low-inventory OFO. The order, effectivetoday, carries $1/dth penalties for negative imbalances exceeding10%.

Citing significant market area demand, Florida Gas Transmissionissued an Overage Alert Day notice (6% tolerance for daily negativeimbalances) Monday for the system east of Station 12 (Santa RosaCounty, FL). The pipeline will re-evaluate conditions this morningbefore deciding whether to extend the notice.

After almost 18 months of detailed proceedings and negativelegislative signals, California regulators have pulled backsubstantially from original proposals to unbundle the state’snatural gas industry along the lines of the state’s electricderegulation.

After almost 18 months of detailed proceedings and negativelegislative signals, California regulators have pulled backsubstantially from original proposals to unbundle the state’snatural gas industry along the lines of its electric deregulation.

Transco shippers have accumulated a significant negativeimbalance through the first 20 days of April, the pipeline said. Inorder to avoid restrictions that would be caused by a large volumeof receipt makeup transactions requested to flow for a limited timeat the end of the month, Transco urged that such transactions bescheduled as soon as possible to allow a steady flow rate throughApril 30.