Soft

Voting to join the old with the new, members of the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT), a 136-year-old floor-based soft commodity exchange, voted overwhelmingly last week to merge with the rapidly expanding IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), one of the newest and fastest growing electronic exchanges, in a $1 billion-plus proposed transaction.

Voting to join the old with the new, members of the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT), a 136-year-old floor-based soft commodity exchange, voted overwhelmingly Monday to merge with the rapidly expanding IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), one of the newest and fastest growing electronic exchanges, in a $1 billion-plus proposed transaction.

A day after cautioning that it might need to declare an Underage Alert Day Tuesday due to high linepack and soft market-area demand (see Daily GPI, June 20), conditions apparently had changed enough that Florida Gas Transmission issued an Overage Alert Day instead, citing forecasts of 90-degree weather in Florida. The OAD carried 25% tolerance for negative daily imbalances.

Barring a snap back to cold weather, look for natural gas prices to remain “soft” at around $7/MMBtu and perhaps less for the remainder of the first half of this year, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service said in a 2006 oil and gas trends research note released last week.

Barring a snap back to cold weather, look for natural gas prices to remain “soft” at around $7/MMBtu and perhaps less for the remainder of the first half of this year, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service said in a 2006 oil and gas trends research note released Tuesday.

Apparent soft demand in the Mid-Atlantic market has forced Greenbrier Pipeline Co. LLC to ask FERC for a two-year extension to build and put into operation its proposed 279-mile pipeline that’s intended to serve local distributors and power generators in the region. This comes after Greenbrier announced an indefinite delay of the project in November.

Apparent soft demand in the Mid-Atlantic market has forced Greenbrier Pipeline Co. LLC to ask FERC for a two-year extension to build and put into operation its proposed 279-mile pipeline that’s intended to serve local distributors and power generators in the region. This comes after Greenbrier announced an indefinite delay of the project in November.

With little change in overall weather fundamentals over the weekend, the cash market generally emulated the screen Monday and sat back to await further developments. Most points were about a nickel or less up or down from flat; larger gains and losses were few, scattered and capped at 15-20 cents or so.

Thursday’s prices were pretty soft with across the board declines ranging from a nickel to about 35 cents. But traders had no doubt that much bigger bears would rear up in the cash market Friday.