Thursday

Due to freezing weather, Northern Natural Gas declared a SystemOverrun Limitation for all market-area zones Thursday.

When futures took a steep dive after cash trading had beencompleted Thursday, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to predictthat cash prices would be headed into the dumpster Friday. Sureenough, quotes for the weekend were way down. Most of the declineswere between 10 and 25 cents, but some in Appalachia and theNortheast reached the 40-50 cents range. The smaller drops tendedto be concentrated at western points.

Following one of the quietest trading sessions in recent memoryThursday, the futures market snapped back to life Friday as tradersetched out a wide, 20-cent range in bumpy, pre-weekend dealings.After trading as low as $2.55 and as high as $2.76 the Novembercontract finished the week strongly, gaining 5 cents to $2.692.Estimated volume of 79,860 confirmed the heavy activity.

Williams Field Services declared force majeure following aThursday morning fire and explosion at its Opal (WY) Lean OilPlant. The fire started about 6:30 a.m. MDT and a rich-oil heaterexploded shortly thereafter. The Lean Oil Plant was removed fromservice but two cryogenic units remained on-line. Volumes throughOpal were reduced to 430 MMcf/d from a normal maximum capacity of700 MMcf/d. However, WFS said it “does not anticipate significantreductions” in overall gas gathered behind the plant or in tailgatedeliveries to interconnecting pipelines.

El Paso has rescheduled maintenance at its Roswell (NM) Station,which was postponed last week (see Daily GPI, Aug. 31), for today and Thursday. It willcut San Juan Crossover capacity by 30 MMcf/d.

Taking a cue from Thursday’s Access trade sell-off, the futuresmarket continued lower Friday as traders fully discounted thecurrent trio of storms by aggressively exiting their longpositions. By 2:40 p.m., the September contract had fallen justshort of filling in the chart gap down to $2.805. However, $2.83was all that the sellers could muster and prices rallied in thelast 30 minutes of trading. The September contract settled at$2.912, down 3.6 cents for the day but up more than 8 cents fromits earlier low.

After warning shippers Wednesday that one was possible, FloridaGas Transmission issued an Overage Alert Day notice for Thursday’sgas day due to high market-area demand. The notice has a 6%tolerance for daily negative imbalances and covers the system eastof Station 12 (Santa Rosa County in the Florida Panhandle). Thepipeline will re-evaluate conditions this morning before decidingwhether to extend the notice.

Citing “significant” market area demand, Florida GasTransmission issued an Overage Alert Day notice for Thursday in thearea east of Station 12 (Santa Rosa County in the FloridaPanhandle). The notice carries a 3% tolerance for daily negativeimbalances.

Florida Power & Light Co. (FPL) said Thursday it receivedapproval of its final construction permits to restructure the FortMyers power plant and will begin work at the site immediately.Generation from the $500 million project (called a “repowering”project) will be phased in beginning in early 2001 withcombined-cycle conversion complete by mid-year 2002.