Reasonable

Natural gas is the common denominator that will “foster allreasonable wishes” of environmental groups and still support majorand sustained economic activity for the foreseeable future,according to a University of Houston economics professor who so farhas been on target in his predictions about energy.

Bombing Iraq seemed as reasonable an explanation as any for whymost cash markets were rising in the neighborhood of a dimeWednesday. Weather was getting a little colder but still relativelymild for this time of year, so it’s not like there’s any big surgein gas demand, a marketer said. The AGA storage report of 49 Bcf inwithdrawals last week, which came too late to affect Wednesday’strading, was approximately in the middle of most expectations andthus neither bearish nor bullish.

It seemed reasonable Thursday to expect that prices would besoftening Friday. Sources ticked off good reasons for thinking so:a low-demand holiday weekend; forecasts of moderating Western heat;and the end of storm-related outages in the Gulf Coast.

It seemed reasonable to expect that with the Henry Hub futuresprice barely budging on its last day of trading, cash numbers forMay wouldn’t be moving much in either direction either, as a coupleof sources said prior to the screen expiry Tuesday. Yet tradersreported prices rising a few cents in several markets in afternoondeals. A marketer whose Chicago citygates were in the low $2.30sMonday submitted quotes in the mid to high $2.30s Tuesday. AndPermian Basin gas traded at $2.08-09 most of the day but bumped upto $2.11-12 after the screen closed, a producer said.