Natural gas futures rose to their highest settlement price in a year, exceeding $6 per million British thermal units as cold weather across the U.S. lifted demand for heating fuel. Temperatures in St. Louis, Memphis and Dallas will be below normal for the next week, according to a forecast from MDA Federal Inc.’s EarthSat Energy Weather. Cold weather in recent weeks cut a stockpile surplus to 14 percent for the week ended Dec. 25 from 16 percent at the start of the month. “Storage is going from materially oversupplied to more manageable inventory levels,” said Tom Orr, director of research at Weeden & Co., a brokerage in Greenwich, Connecticut. “It looks like it’s going to continue to be pretty cold here.”
Natural gas for February delivery advanced 37.2 cents, or 6.6 percent, to settle at $6.009 per million Btu at 2:50 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price was the highest since Jan. 5, 2009. The Energy Department may say tomorrow that U.S. stockpiles dropped 155 billion cubic feet last week, based on the median of 21 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The “seasonal norm” withdrawal is 83 billion, Scott Speaker, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s natural gas strategist in New York, said in a note to clients yesterday. “We see a net withdrawal of 144 billion cubic feet, a draw that would significantly tighten the current year over year surplus and the surplus compared to the past five year average,” he said.....Read the entire article.
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