Prices were still moving higher Friday, but at roughly half the pace of Thursday’s uprising. Overall, Friday’s increases ranged from about 8 to 20 cents. Gulf Coast numbers generally rose on either side of a dime, with moderately larger gains in the teens prevailing in other market areas. Most of the upticks above 15 cents were in the West.

Cash gas could claim more fundamental support Friday than it had gotten for Thursday’s larger advance. Heavy snows in the Upper Plains and Upper Midwest were helping boost Midcontinent numbers, and even prompted an OFO-like constraint in its market area by Northern Natural Gas (see Transportation Notes). The bad weather would be swinging toward the Appalachians over the weekend, a forecasting service said. And although nothing like the siege of arctic conditions a week earlier was expected, a return of colder temperatures was due in the Northeast and possibly along the upper edge of the Southeast.

Snowstorms in the Rockies were expected to fade by Saturday, but a new Pacific storm was due to move inland from San Francisco northward. The storms helped generate Friday’s biggest gains of about 20 cents at the Cheyenne Hub, CIG and Northwest-domestic points. A maintenance project will be cutting Opal Plant volumes starting today (see Transportation Notes), which gave a further boost to Rockies numbers.

A Calgary trader said temperatures there were minus 28 degrees Celsius Friday. He had to assume that NOVA was able to return to normal imbalance tolerances because drafting of the system had been eliminated for a couple of days by a previous range that did not allow negative imbalances.

Western prices also benefited from fairly large increases in California power prices, a marketer said. He reported being told by a power generator that it had returned to service several gas-fired units that had been down for maintenance since last month. The east-of-California utilities were other major buyers, he said, as reports were circulating of some western coal power plants going down for maintenance.

But one source said things were “pretty dull back in Texas,” where spring-like weather pervaded the state. TUFCO (the gas-buying arm of the TXU electric utility) didn’t buy anything for the weekend from him, “and they’re usually good customers.” He and others perceived Friday’s activity as considerably more sedate than earlier in the week. He said he thought a lot of traders had finished up early in order to attend college basketball tournaments.

An East Coast utility buyer noted that prices maintained strength, even with screen support apparently fizzling Friday. He guessed that some momentum must have carried over from Thursday’s spikes. But a Midcontinent marketer pointed out that even through futures drifted in the vicinity of flat Friday morning, the screen numbers themselves were a little more than a dime above what was happening during Thursday morning’s cash trading period. He had recorded April futures in the mid to high $2.60s Thursday morning, and cash traders made their deals with the screen in the high $2.70s Friday morning.

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