Ride

With cooler weather in the process of replacing the mid-spring heat surge that had allowed prices to ride increased power generation load to higher levels in most cases during the first three days of the week, it was hardly surprising when quotes fell across the board Thursday.

Continuing their ride on a slippery slide lower, May natural gas futures on Wednesday broke below the psychological $7 level after failing to move any higher than $7.14 in morning trade. After recording a low for the session of $6.97, the prompt month ended up settling at $6.978, down 11.6 cents for the day.

Northern Natural Gas does not have to continue providing Transwestern Pipeline customers a free ride on a portion of its system under an agreement that the two pipelines entered into a decade ago, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said last Wednesday in dismissing a show-cause proceeding against Northern Natural.

It was a wild ride Wednesday in swing trading for the last day of September. All points spiked by amounts ranging from about 30 cents to nearly a dollar, with a heavy majority up 60 cents or more, in a market driven largely by a screen that soared nearly half a dollar Tuesday and was up by almost 90 cents at one point Wednesday morning before retreating in sympathy with falling oil futures.

After taking a wild ride in morning trading to a $6.48 high, the June natural gas futures contract settled down a bit Wednesday afternoon to close at $6.405, up 1.9 cents on the day. With a lackluster natural gas storage report expected Thursday morning, traders said the futures market could move in either direction given the recent gains.

Cash prices galloped 35-40 cents higher across the country on Tuesday in response to Monday’s wild 37-cent jump in June gas futures and the continued strength in the gas and oil futures markets on Tuesday.

Twenty-eight major energy companies reported that their net earnings were nearly cut in half to $20.6 billion in fiscal 2002 due to supply-induced lower prices for natural gas and crude oil and the collapse of the energy trading business that year, according to the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) annual report to Congress on the industry’s performance.

Cooler temperatures, continuing wide basis spreads and an early jump in near-month futures led many gas cash market observers to expect early Tuesday that it would be another day of daily spot increases, but averages actually ended the day down a few cents in most cases and the tide appeared to be turning on Nymex by the afternoon.

Though it opened and closed at almost the same level, the natural gas futures market was anything but a kiddie’s ride Tuesday as waves of buying and selling led prices on a roller coaster of trading activity.