Steep 12.2% loss in holiday-shortened week
--Inventories 21% above five-year average
--Brief cold spell stalls challenge of $2/mmBtu level
(Adds analyst comment, price table)
By David Bird
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Natural-gas futures settled modestly higher Friday, snapping a tumultuous eight-day losing streak that slashed prices by 24% to 10-year lows.
The slim 0.9% rise barely dented the 12.2% decline over the four-day trading week, which was shortened by Monday's Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.
Prospects of the season's first cold snap and snowfall in the New York harbor region since a freak late-October storm shook shell-shocked buyers from the sidelines. But bears still rule the market, with forecasts calling for warmer-than-normal temperatures lingering across much of the U.S. through February.
Many market players see potential for prices shedding a further 15% to challenge the $2-per million British thermal units level last breached in late January 2002. Some see the drop coming next week, when the Jan. 27 expiration of the February futures contracts means traders have just five weeks of winter-delivery gas futures to trade, amid an exceptionally warm winter.
Natural gas for February delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange settled 2.1 cents higher, at $2.343 per million British thermal units. Prices fell 32.7 cents in the week, after a 39.2-cent, or 12.8%, drop in the previous week.
Above-normal temperatures have squelched demand, and with natural gas output steadily setting record highs, bloated inventories are intensifying pressure on prices. Gas marketers are taking far less gas from storage than normal to meet customer demand.
"The fear factor is diminishing" that a cold snap will cause players with short-positions, or those who expect prices to fall further, to have to buy up contracts to cover their position, said Kyle Cooper of IAF Energy Advisors in Houston. "There is much less possibility now it is going to really get cold. I see us still pushing lower to $2 or below. Inventories are super-high and we are just adding to supplies" with higher output, he said.
The Energy Information Administration said Thursday U.S. natural-gas inventories fell just 87 billion cubic feet last week, a much smaller-than-normal decline. Total inventories now stand at 3.29 trillion cubic feet, a record for this time of year. Stocks are 20% higher than a year ago and 21% above the five-year average.
With demand down, withdrawals of inventory from storage last week were just 38% of the size of last year's 228 billion-cubic-foot drawdown and 54% of the five-year average decline of 162 Bcf for the week.
Tim Evans, analyst at Citi Futures Perspective, noted that in 20 weeks, inventories have gone from a 60-bfc deficit to the five-year average to the current 566 bcf surplus. He expects storage withdrawals in the next three weeks to also lag the year-ago and five-year levels, pushing the surplus to the five-year average up to 767 bcf on Feb. 3.
"It's going to take more than a few days of cold to make a dent in the storage surplus," he said, adding that "time is running out on the heating season. February, on average, tends to be a few degrees warmer than January, and March will be warmer still," Evans said.