BS: Natural Gas Futures Fall on Mild Weather, Lack of Gulf Storms
Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Natural gas futures fell as forecasts showed mild weather in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest, limiting demand for the power-plant fuel.
Temperatures will be in a normal range through Sept. 16, according to Commodity Weather Group in Bethesda, Maryland. Tropical Storm Hermine has crossed the Rio Grande River into south Texas after making landfall in northeastern Mexico, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said at 7 a.m. local time, posing little risk to gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.
“You are not going to see warmer-than-normal weather this week,” said Cameron Horwitz, an analyst in Houston at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc., a unit of Georgia’s biggest bank. No tropical storm “is going to be ominous and that’s not going to be supportive” for gas prices.
Natural gas for October delivery fell 10.4 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $3.835 per million British thermal units at 9:54 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The futures have declined 31 percent this year.
Mild weather will make it “increasingly difficult to achieve significant cooling demand in areas like the Midwest and East in the extended period,” Commodity Weather Group said.
New York will have a high of 71 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius) on Sept. 9, 6 degrees below normal, according to AccuWeather.com in State College, Pennsylvania. Boston will have a high of 73 degrees.
Hermine is expected to weaken further as it moves from Texas northward into Oklahoma over the next day or so, the hurricane center said.
Tropical Storm Gaston in the northern Leeward Islands has a 20 percent chance of re-forming into a tropical cyclone over the next 48 hours, according to the center.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month reduced its 2010 Atlantic hurricane forecast to 14 to 20 named storms from an earlier estimate of 14 to 23.
--Editors: Bill Banker, Richard Stubbe
To contact the reporters on this story: Moming Zhou in New York at Mzhou29@bloomberg.net;
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Stets at dstets@bloomberg.net
