Rockies

The overall weather outlook remains mild to cool, but overnight lows in the 30s and 40s in parts of the Northeast, Rockies and Canada may have been enough to pull the cash market out of its recent slide Tuesday. Certainly the futures drop of 4.9 cents a day earlier didn’t contribute anything to the cause.

Rockies Express (REX) said an outage of one unit at Bertrand Compressor Station experienced Thursday kept it unavailable Friday although repair crews worked on resolving the issue. However, at the current level of scheduled quantities (both Intraday 1 and Timely) through Segment 250, scheduling reductions were not necessary Friday, REX said, but if nominations increase for future cycles, a force majeure may be required.

Following the trend toward liquids-rich basins, Penn Virginia Corp. recently announced plans to sell much of its Mid-continent assets to an undisclosed buyer for $30.5 million.

Tennessee lifted Saturday evening an OFO Action Alert for meters on the 200 Line downstream of Station 249.

El Paso Corp.’s Ruby Pipeline, which will transport Rockies natural gas to West Coast markets, has asked FERC for the go-ahead to place the new long-haul pipeline into service by the end of the month (see Daily GPI, July 12).

Neither Southern California Gas nor Pacific Gas and Electric extended high-linepack OFOs beyond Saturday.

It’s well documented by now that due to low natural gas prices a number of producers and oilfield service companies have been switching drilling efforts and asset buildup from the primarily dry gas Haynesville to “wetter” [that is, richer in crude oil and natural gas liquids (NGL)] plays such as the Eagle Ford and Marcellus. But quite a few in the industry see Haynesville as remaining a strong shale resource and eventually strengthening. It may take a few years, but many expect gas prices to eventually begin making up for ground lost to the soaring crude market.

Except for a sizeable number of flat to moderately higher locations in the West — where a cooling trend is taking overnight lows in the Rockies and Upper Plains back to either side of freezing — and elsewhere, Tuesday’s overall firmness didn’t last. Most of the cash market fell Wednesday due to a combination of a dearth of eastern weather-based load — in the form of either heat or substantive cold — and three successive previous days of futures weakness.

Although milder weather will begin returning Wednesday to the Northeast and Rockies, the cash market managed to sustain this week’s overall rebound at most trading locations Tuesday. The temperature increases would still leave lows on either side of freezing in several parts of those regions, and thermometer levels inching lower in other areas would chip in small amounts of heating load to partially counteract the pockets of moderation.