Wane

After half a century as a mainstay of markets across Canada and the United States, Alberta’s role in North American natural gas will wane rapidly, says the province’s Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB).

Falling cash prices at nearly all points Thursday reflected the fact that the latest blast of cold weather is starting to wane, although forecasts of Friday lows around freezing were still common in northern market areas and extended as far south as Atlanta.

With cooling demand starting to wane in parts of the West and North, Friday’s continuation of price hikes at most points were based mostly on two previous days of screen strength, although power generation load remained fairly substantial overall. Reflecting the moderate weakening of weather fundamentals and the drop in industrial demand associated with a weekend, Friday’s upticks were smaller than Thursday’s, and a few Midcontinent and Rockies points were flat.

FERC’s widely-anticipated move last week to extend price controls on bulk electricity transactions to the entire Western region around the clock blew through Washington with hurricane force, shifting the political winds away from price caps in the Senate. However, just as the volatile issue of price caps began to subside somewhat on Capitol Hill, a new debate emerged in Congress over whether the agency should be more aggressive in ordering generators to provide refunds for overcharges that California Gov. Gray Davis said run into the billions of dollars.