Thursday, January 17th saw the front-month NYMEX Natural Gas Futures Contracts open at $3.535, fifteen cents above Wednesday’s closing price of $3.384. Testing the market’s upper limits early on, the contract tallied the intraday high of $3.562 at 9:30AM and traded within a tight band in the following hour. Losing ground in the minutes following the storage report’s release, prices slipped below $3.400 by 11:30AM only to reclaim the $3.50 mark an hour later. Ending the day on a downbeat, February closed higher on Thursday at $3.413.
The EIA Natural Gas Storage Report published on Thursday showed an 81 BCF withdrawal from storage for the week ended January 11th – just below the market estimate of 84 BCF. Total working gas in storage was reported as 2,533 BCF; 3.0% below this time last year and 11.4% below the five-year average.
This morning in Globex, WTI Crude was up 58 cents; Natural Gas was down seventeen cents; Heating Oil was up one cent; and Gasoline was up one cent.
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