Moderate warming trends in parts of the Midwest and Northeast, along with Friday’s 13.3-cent uptick by July futures and the return of industrial load from its typical weekend decline, propelled the cash market to gains at a large majority of points Monday.

The few instances of softness were in the Rockies, which had been the only rising market area Friday, and at Florida Gas Zone 3 and the Florida citygate after the pipeline allowed an Overage Alert Day to expire over the weekend.

Most points were flat to about 60 cents higher. The losses ranged from a little more than a nickel to about $1.10.

The days largest losses occurred at Opal and into Kern River (the Opal Plant provides a major portion of Kern River’s throughput) and were largely attributed to a two-day maintenance outage starting Tuesday at a Questar Overthrust compressor station, which will cause Rockies Express to take the capacity it leases on Questar Overthrust to zero (see Transportation Notes).

A Rockies marketer was unaware of anything besides the Questar Overthrust work that might have contributed to the dollar-plus drop at Opal, but he said Opal quotes were starting to “recover strongly” in late deals Monday. All of the falling Rockies points experienced very wide multi-dollar trading ranges Monday, he noted.

The CIG basis deficit to Henry Hub expanded to about $3.82 Monday, a Rockies producer observed. With the Questar Overthrust maintenance going on through Wednesday, he thought Rockies prices could continue to weaken Tuesday, “at least in the western part of Wyoming. CIG could be interesting because [it] might be a little short of gas going east.”

Temperature increases in the Midwest and Northeast will be on the modest side, one source noted, and with many cities in those regions peaking around only 80 degrees Tuesday, any gains in cooling load will be limited for now. However, more sections of the South are starting to reach 90 degrees or greater than last week, and the increased use of air conditioning was telling in helping boost Monday’s market.

“We’re trying to decide what do about storage injections,” said the fuel buyer at a Midwest LDC. Very high gas prices “have thrown a curve at our schedule,” she added.

The company has been seeing quite a lot of gas use recently from an electric utility in its territory because of nuclear plant downtime, but the nuke was scheduled to come back up to 100% output Monday, the buyer said. However, a heat wave is in the forecast for later this week, so power generation load is likely to remain strong, she said.

The buyer reported that she bought a little bit of July baseload at Northern Natural-demarc for index plus a quarter of a cent. It seems like July prices are trying to move higher, she said.

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