Last week’s market closed out Friday with a reversal of the previous day’s mild rally in fairly quiet activity. A large majority of the weekend price declines were on either side of a dime, but a few ranged up to about 15 cents. Florida citygates recorded a modest gain of about a nickel.

What a Calgary-based trader called “a big dump of snow” and sub-freezing weather drove intra-Alberta numbers up a few cents on average and sent some weekend quotes as high as the upper C$3.00s. Same-day gas was even higher, said a marketer quoting same-day Aeco trades from the mid C$3.10s to the mid C$3.20s.

The cold and supply constraints on NOVA were keeping more gas within the province. That and a big winter storm descending into the Pacific Northwest over the weekend kept Canadian-related points Sumas, Kingsgate and Stanfield essentially flat and limited Northern California price drops to a nickel or less.

Otherwise, weather that was nearly spring-like in some areas proved unable to sustain the small upticks that many eastern points had seen Thursday. Some parts of the Midwest were as much as 30 degrees above normal for this time of the year, according to The Weather Channel, and temperatures also were above normal in the South and Northeast.

Northeast citygates saw several of Friday’s price drops exceeding a dime. The tightening of the spread between the production and market areas prompted one marketer to eschew any citygate deals. “It was too cheap in the Northeast for us to make transport from the Gulf Coast work,” he explained.

An intrastate Texas source said he had seen a sizeable increase in supply requests Thursday as a cold front raced through the state, “but they’re disappearing again now that the front has left Texas behind.”

The Malin average was down only a couple of pennies, largely due to a moderate late spike, a marketer said. He had done most of his Malin deals throughout the $2.00s, but reported a late sale in the mid $2.10s “when somebody came up short about 10 minutes before deadline.”

The start of bidweek was understandably slow as few traders wanted to make any commitments other than indexing prior to the weekend, preferring to wait for fresher weather forecast data this week. A Northeast trader reported Transco Zone 6-NYC commanding an index premium of 6 cents.

Intrastate Texas basis for February was tightening (getting less negative) Friday, one trader said. He was hearing basis of minus 1.5 cents at Houston Ship Channel and minus 7 cents at Waha.

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