With big rebounds Monday, prices continued a pattern of mimicking the behavior of the trading days bracketing the Oct. 2-3 weekend. The latest rally had gains in the Gulf Coast and Northeast smaller than those of a week earlier, while advances in the Midcontinent/Midwest and West generally surpassed the ones at the same points on Oct. 4.

Henry Hub and Sonat saw only small rebounds of a little less than a dime. Otherwise Monday’s gains ranged from about 15 cents to more than a dollar.

Except for some heat developing in the desert Southwest, weather influences remained rather benign for most of the gas market. Due to that and a 17-cent screen loss (despite Nymex’s crude oil and heating oil contracts climbing to ever-loftier heights again), the cash market was believed unlikely to sustain its return of strength through Tuesday.

A Northeast utility buyer and a Gulf Coast producer reported hearing of no new shut-ins attributable to the weekend passage of Tropical Storm Matthew through the production area offshore Louisiana. The Minerals Management Service office in New Orleans was off for the federal Columbus Day holiday and thus not scheduled to issue a new shut-ins report until midday Tuesday.

Matthew, which did not achieve named status until late Friday afternoon after many traders had already left their offices for the weekend, was not regarded as a major storm, although it did dump copious amounts of rain on southeastern Louisiana. The National Hurricane Center quit issuing further public advisories on Matthew Sunday morning after reporting that the system had weakened to a depression after coming ashore. Matthew’s remnants moved eastward Monday over the lower Mississippi Valley, further dampening power generation demand in an already mild Southeast.

Nicole became the 14th named storm of the year despite being classified as a “subtropical” system. It posed no danger to the U.S. production area as it moved quickly northeastward away from Bermuda Monday, but NHC was plotting its course across eastern Nova Scotia and western Newfoundland.

A producer said his company bought “quite a lot of Louisiana supply” Monday, so it seemed as if counterparties would have mentioned it if there were any significant new outages due to Matthew. Because the storm happened over the weekend, “it might not even have registered” on the market’s radar scope, he added.

Referring to recent wide ranges and premium top-end numbers at Henry Hub, which continued Monday, the producer questioned trading activity in the physical market. “I usually get in around 7 a.m. [CDT]” and in recent days have found the Hub trading at what seems like ridiculously high levels early before prices head lower, he said.

A Northeast utility buyer also reported not hearing of any new Matthew-related shut-ins, but added that he would have to believe that the storm further hampered the work of turning back on wells that were shut in during Hurricane Ivan. “We still have very little weather load,” the buyer went on.. Temperatures will be nice through midweek and then turning cooler by the weekend, but much like last week, it won’t get cool enough to generate any appreciable heating demand, he said. He reported seeing Canadian-sourced gas up about 60 cents, so instead he bought “just a little” Appalachian supply, which increased only about half that much.

A utility buyer in the Lower Midwest also said his company was seeing little weather load currently and is “about 99% full” on storage, so unless it can find an immediate burn need, “we’re pretty much out of the spot market.” However, he saw a chance for some furnaces getting turned on in his service area by the weekend, saying a cooling trend was predicted to have highs in the mid 50s and lows around freezing late this week. He noted that Northern Natural As “keeps restricting storage injections to firm” service, and said the firm customers are about to run out of available capacity.

Besides high temperatures in the 90-degree area in the Southwest, western markets got a little extra boost from the absence of high-linepack OFOs that had been implemented Saturday by PG&E and SoCalGas.

Lehman Brothers analyst Thomas Driscoll said he expects a storage injection of 70 Bcf to be reported for the week ended Oct. 8.

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