Repeated

Following Thursday’s significant plunge lower, May natural gas futures on Friday kept the trend going, barely skipping a beat. After repeated attacks on support levels in the low to mid $7.20s, the prompt month ended up settling at $7.242, down 12.4 cents on the day and 50.7 cents lower than the previous Friday’s close.

Florida Gas Transportation issued an Overage Alert Day notice Friday with 20% tolerance for negative daily imbalances.

Wednesday’s market almost repeated the one on Tuesday. Once again several flat to moderately higher points mixed it up with a lot of declines. Losses ranged up to about 15 cents, but as on Tuesday most were less than a dime.

“Let’s roll” was the oft-repeated refrain of Republican and some Democrat conferees Friday, as they met in an initial conference committee session and pledged to finish work by the end of the month on a comprehensive energy bill that would respond to the public’s concerns about an aging electric transmission infrastructure, potential winter price spikes in natural gas and obscenely high gasoline prices.

“Let’s roll” was the oft-repeated refrain of Republican and some Democrat conferees Friday, as they met in an initial conference committee session and pledged to finish work by the end of the month on a comprehensive energy bill that would respond to the public’s concerns about an aging electric transmission infrastructure, potential winter price spikes in natural gas and obscenely high gasoline prices.

In a sequence that likely will be repeated often this summer, California’s independent transmission grid operator, Cal-ISO, Thursday erred on the side of getting out advance warning of possible rolling blackouts only to pull back the emergency measure within minutes of the targeted time for blackouts to begin. As of 4 p.m. (PDT), the blackouts had not become necessary in the second consecutive day of Stage One and Two alerts.

After being thwarted in repeated attempts to punch through the$4.23 level during the first hour of trading, natural gas bullsturned in their horns Friday, giving way to light sellingthroughout the rest of the session. Limited to an extremely tight,7-cent range for the day, the August contract slipped 1.6 cents tofinish the week at $4.15.

The East-West divergence in price tendencies was repeated againTuesday in a slightly different way. While Monday’s overall uptickshad been most pronounced in the West, eastern markets retreated byabout a nickel Tuesday as Western markets managed mostly flat tobarely-off-a-penny performances.

Like the “Row, row, row your boat” verse that repeats over andover, cash prices repeated their flat trading pattern Tuesday forthe umpteenth time in 1999. Several points made small gains of 1-3cents, likely deriving their modest firmness from a similar rise onthe futures screen.