Despite getting prior-day screen support and frigid weather continuing to linger in several regions, cash prices were down at a large majority of locations Thursday. The market may regain its footing as soon as Friday, however, as the West leads yet another turnaround to lower temperatures in a substantial portion of North America.

A few flat to about 2 cents higher averages were sprinkled among losses ranging from 2-3 cents to about 30 cents. Northeast citygates and a few of the Rockies pipes tended to see most of the largest drops.

With analyst projections virtually solid in anticipating one more net addition to storage before withdrawals started a month into the traditional withdrawal season, the Energy Information Administration dropped a mini-bombshell on them by reporting a 1 Bcf pull for the week ending Nov. 25. That was considerably less than consensus estimates centered around 10 Bcf. Although futures later retreated from their heights soon after the report, the news was bullish enough to cause the January contract to end the day up 9.8 cents (see related story).

In its final outlook report on the 2011 season late Wednesday evening, the National Hurricane Center signaled that all was quiet on the Atlantic tropical front.

The South is continuing on a moderating trend for now before chillier conditions are expected to return around the end of the weekend. The status quo along with small thermometer movements both up and down are prevailing for now in the Midwest and Northeast, but overnight lows in the 30s for much of those regions are keeping heating load fairly brisk. The coldest areas are concentrated in the West, with lows mostly in the teens and 30s from the Rockies through Western Canada expected to sink further into the teens through subzero readings during the weekend. Even Sacramento in interior California can expect near-freezing lows by Saturday, according to an AccuWeather.com forecast on Kern River’s bulletin board.

After announcing Wednesday that it had been working to build its linepack in anticipation of significantly colder market-area weather, El Paso said Thursday it had set the probability of declaring a Strained Operating Condition or Critical Operating Condition to high because of excess linepack.

A western utility buyer said his company’s service area was starting to turn colder again Thursday and would feel substantial chill at least through the weekend and probably into the coming week. Noting a news story that 100-mph windstorms had caused up to 300,000 in California to lose power, he said that may have cost gas some power generation load, although he didn’t think it was much.

The buyer noted that in recent weeks back-and-forth variability between moderate and very cold weather conditions every few days created scheduling and imbalance problems for the utility, its customers and the upstream pipelines.

Noting that the CIG-Henry Hub basis spread had widened to about 19 cents Thursday (CIG lower) after being near parity or with CIG at a premium since October, a Rockies producer said he thought parity would eventually return, although it might take a while. He said there was still plenty of takeaway capacity from the Rockies, although he wasn’t sure if it would get cold enough in the Midwest to send gas there in the near term. Ruby Pipeline throughput is taking a substantial hit with Wednesday’s expiration of a number of capacity contracts, but the producer didn’t think Ruby would have much of a problem in recontracting that capacity.

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