What had seemed earlier to be a rather innocuous tropical wave, doing little more than providing lots of rain for the Florida peninsula, emerged as Tropical Storm Barry around midday Thursday and suddenly posed a very real threat to Gulf of Mexico production. Although most prices continued to soften Thursday, sources look for Barry to generate a rally in today’s trading for the weekend. The screen pointed the way upward for cash with a dime-plus gain Thursday.

California was the sole market to realize moderate upticks Thursday. Otherwise all points were falling anywhere from about a nickel to a quarter, with losses in the teens being most common. Appalachian/Northeast points recorded some of the smaller declines, largely because the region was joining the rest of the East with high temperatures in the 90s. However, a cold front is expected to subdue the Northeast’s budding heat wave over the weekend, a marketer said. As of 5 p.m. EDT Thursday Barry was about 315 miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River, according to the National Weather Service. It was moving toward the northwest at 4 mph and likely to make a gradual turn to a west-northwest track Friday, NWS said, forecasting “some strengthening” of Barry, which was packing maximum sustained winds of 45 MPH yesterday evening. Barry’s path could take it through the main producing area of the Gulf.

Texas Eastern, Sonat and Transco issued shipper advisories warning that some production losses were possible. Transco said it might be necessary to force balance its system “to the extent these production losses are realized.” Sonat said Barry was projected to be over its supply “within the next 48 hours.” And Texas Eastern “strongly recommends [that] TABS parties rank their markets should restrictions occur over the next few days.”

A news report late Thursday afternoon said Chevron had evacuated about 700 workers from Gulf platforms and planned to bring more workers ashore today, but had not shut in any production yet. Chevron could not be reached for confirmation by press deadline.

A marketer said his company’s consulting service was projecting that Barry could make landfall anywhere from Alabama’s Mobile Bay all the way to Galveston, TX, southeast of Houston. It wasn’t a certainty that Barry will cause shut-ins, he said, but there’s a strong likelihood of rising prices today because of the potential. “We should know a lot more Friday about its route.”

Another trader observed that “it could get messy for Gulf Coast traders because any storm shut-ins might not start until the weekend, and they would have to make nominations Friday without knowing whether everything was going to be OK or not.”

One source was rather upset about Tennessee delaying the start of a lengthy 500 Line maintenance outage until Monday (see Transportation Notes), saying it meant he would have to split his weekend nominations on the line into Saturday-Sunday and Monday-only periods. But another Gulf Coast trader didn’t see any problem, saying he could wait until Monday and make intraday adjustments for Tennessee flows. “Actually I hope everybody else does that [splitting weekend nominations]; then I should be able to flow my Tennessee gas without any problems,” he added.

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