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Despite some bearish fundamentals gas prices remain strong, but unless some significant winter-like weather shows up in the next 30-45 days the gas market “has the possibility to really sell off meaningfully,” the manager of hedge fund Terra Verte Trading LP told conference attendees Monday.

Colorado’s natural gas drilling shows unrelenting growth, and “nothing could be more critical” than having an open and transparent dialogue with the industry, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (DNR) said last week.

Colorado’s natural gas drilling shows no signs of slowing down, and because of that, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (DNR) said “nothing could be more critical” than keeping a dialogue with industry open and transparent.

There’s no reprieve in sight from gas demand growth from Canadian oil sands operations. An industrial natural gas consumer forecast shows the oil sands continuing to eat into Canadian gas exports to the United States.

The natural gas futures market began this week much like it finished off the last one as traders on Monday toyed with both two-year-old support and almost three-year lows. October natural gas, which expires Wednesday, pushed to a low of $4.420 Monday before settling at $4.475, down 15.2 cents on the day.

A closer look at 27 U.S. gas storage systems shows that as many as 20 of them, including the massive Columbia system, National Fuel, Tennessee Gas, Southern Natural and others, could be full well before the end of the storage injection season this year, leaving a substantial amount of gas supply stranded and potentially shut in, according to an analysis by Golden, CO-based consulting firm Bentek Energy.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is negotiating with other senators on the Lease Sale 181 bill that was voted out by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in March, Frank Macchiarola, majority counsel for the Senate Energy Committee said Tuesday in a briefing to gas industry representatives in Washington, DC. He said he expects the legislation, which would allow drilling in a small portion of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, to be taken up for a floor vote soon but could not predict exactly when that would happen (see Daily GPI, May 12).

The Center for Liquefied Natural Gas (CLNG) said Tuesday new data shows the actual impact of offshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects on marine life in the Gulf of Mexico will be “substantially less” than originally identified by environmental analyses. CLNG arrived at its findings following an independent ecological review of the analyses.

The rumor that ConocoPhillips has its eye on Burlington Resources shows that the acceleration of merger and acquisition activity this year is likely to continue, according to analysts at Raymond James & Associates. High commodity prices and low reserve valuations in the equity markets continue to drive interest in purchasing domestic exploration and production assets and companies.