Once again, it was not a very volatile day of trading in the natural gas market; the November front month contract decreased by only 0.2%, yet is still at a price that we haven’t seen since the summer peak.
Adding on to yesterday’s point about temperature, Reuters released a report today which quoted the Two-Week Total Demand Days to include 89 Cooling Demand Days, but just a few weeks ago, this number was around the 250s. Clearly, we are past the hump of cooling demand this year, and even though it may be likely for temperatures to be warmer than usual in some areas, overall temperatures are much cooler now.
Also in this report, Reuters is expecting an injection of +60 billion cubic feet into storage. If true, this would be the largest injection of the season so far, but pretty small compared to the 5-year average of +98 bcf this time of year. Again, we started injection season with a lot of gas already in storage, and we are prepared for the winter, but the Utility will still inject as much as possible to avoid any hiccups.
The other big news is that dockworkers on the US East Coast have gone on strike. There is a lot of talk about how this will affect various supply chains, but the consensus in the natural gas space is that this disruption will not significantly affect our industry (our guys are not a part of this union).