Despite all the earlier talk about how mild the weather is turning, markets in the West and Midcontinent/Midwest regions were experiencing or expecting enough heating load to range from flat to up about a dime in most cases Thursday. Gulf Coast and Northeast points continued the previous day’s trend of mild softening, but with a few instances of flat numbers.

According to The Weather Channel (TWC), wet snow (“beginning as rain”) will be moving out of Colorado Friday into western sections of the Midwest and continue on into the Great Lakes area. Also on Friday, it expects a cold front to sweep from the central Plains toward the Appalachians. And although the West will get a bit of respite from the weather Friday, TWC said, new storms will bring rain and mountain snow to California and the Southwest as the weekend begins.

The Energy Information Administration produced an essentially neutral number in reporting a storage withdrawal of 172 Bcf for last week. The volume was near the middle of a wide range of expectations running from less than 150 Bcf to about 200 Bcf. But the screen, in a glitch-marred trading day at Nymex (see related story), cast the pull in a moderately bearish light, falling just over 12 cents on the day. (Although the March heating oil contract also fell, crude oil futures rose more than half a dollar to $36/bbl.)

A marketer said he guessed that the forecast of more snow on the way might have caught a few people napping, because he couldn’t see any other reason for the modest rally in Midcontinent/Midwest prices. Cash trading was “pretty dead” in his opinion because “it seemed like everybody was waiting for the EIA number to come out.” The report didn’t do much to stir up the market, the marketer added, although he was expecting a bigger withdrawal near 200 Bcf.

An intrastate Texas trader reported seeing mostly storage buying in the Lone Star state because there was virtually no weather load there. Waha ran up about a dime suddenly in the middle of trading, he said, although there was no clear reason for it. There’s little transport available from Waha to Katy currently, the trader said; he was offered some Thursday but apparently didn’t jump on it fast enough because the offer got withdrawn soon afterward.

“Everybody seems to be long on gas here and not burning much of it,” said a Florida utility buyer in explaining why she did no trading. Local temperatures got down into the 30s early Thursday, but Friday’s forecast was for a low around 55 and a high in the 70s, so the buyer didn’t expect Florida Gas Transmission to extend a market-area Overage Alert Day notice beyond Thursday.

Opinion on price direction Friday is mixed. Bullish types cited the trends toward colder weather over the weekend, with even the South and Northeast expected to feel new touches of chill. Naysayers pointed to the negative example of futures and the typical weekend slump in industrial demand.

There’s some “tire-kicking” going on for March business, but so far it’s all talk and no action, a marketer said. He added that bidweek was “kind of sneaking up on me” because he had forgotten about February being the shortest month, even though it’s longer than usual in this Leap Year.

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