Daily Market Update January 10, 2018

Early Morning Update

The Feb18 natural gas contract is trading up $0.02 at $2.94.  The Feb18 crude contract is up $0.47 at $63.43.

Summary

Despite warmer changes to the National Weather Service’s 6-10 and 8-14 outlooks, the NYMEX natural gas prompt month contract gained another 8.8 cents yesterday, settling at $2.923/MMBtu. While temperatures have begun to moderate across the East Coast, this week’s storage report will reflect the record setting NG demand levels of late December and early January, and is projected to be larger than the largest withdrawals reported during the polar vortexes. On Monday, the FERC unanimously denied the Department of Energy’s controversial Proposed Rule on Grid Reliability and Resilience Pricing (NOPR). Without financial support, early retirement of coal and nuclear power plants could be down the line, thus likely raising demand for natural gas. However, since Monday’s news, 2019-2024 natural gas calendar strips have had minimal movement, which might be explained by an expectation of enough domestic natural gas supply to support further demand increases.

Market Update 011018