Natural gas futures trade lower on warm winter weather

Investing.com - Natural gas prices traded lower Monday, giving back some of last week’s gains made amid indications major North American gas producers are starting to cut production in the face of weak prices. 

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, natural gas futures for April delivery traded at USD2.76 per million British thermal units during U.S. afternoon  trade, giving back 2.37%.   
Prices earlier hit a high of USD2.81 and are presently trading near the low of the session.

Trading volumes were expected to remain thin throughout the U.S. session as NYMEX floor trading was to remain closed for the U.S. Presidents Day holiday. Electronic trades were to be booked with Tuesday’s transactions for settlement purposes.

Natural gas prices rallied nearly 10.5% in the final two sessions of the preceding week, the biggest two-day gain since October, after Canada’s biggest natural gas producer, Encana, announced plans to cut gas production by as much as 600 million cubic feet per day in a bid to boost prices for the heating fuel.

The company said it would immediately halt 250 million cubic feet a day from wells. The gas producer also said that spending for 2012 will drop about 37% to USD2.9 billion, reducing output by another 250 million cubic feet a day from last year. 

Encana’s reductions come on the heels of similar moves by North American competitors. 
 
Natural gas traders have been keeping a close eye on any moves by gas producers to limit production in the face of low prices. 

Last week, the second largest U.S. natural gas producer Chesapeake Energy said that it had cut more than 500 million cubic feet per day of output and reiterated its earlier decision that it could cut up to one billion cubic feet a day if prices stay low. 

However, market participants are reluctant to bet that prices will rise further amid a lack of production cut announcements from other major U.S. natural gas producers. 

Traders said planned cuts so far were not enough to tighten a market seen oversupplied by as much as 3 billion cubic feet per day, or more than 4%.

Most analysts now expect gas inventories to end the winter at a record high 2.215 trillion cubic feet, 43% above the five-year average.

Also weighing on prices, near-term weather forecasts for most parts of the U.S. continued to point to mild late-February weather. 

Winter so far in the U.S. has been the second mildest since 1950. It is running about 13% warmer than the 30-year normal, according to recent data from MDA EarthSat.    

Inventory withdrawals this winter are running nearly 530 billion cubic feet below average, or about 33%, due to the lack of heating demand this winter.

Last winter at this time, cold weather conditions led to a decline of more than 1.9 trillion cubic feet from U.S. storage to help meet the surge in heating demand.

In contrast, only 1.1 trillion cubic feet of storage gas has been burned this winter season, a 42% drop.

Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs said in a report Friday that U.S. natural gas prices are in a “stable” range that is low enough to encourage power generators to switch from coal and high enough to keep gas producers from cutting production.

The report added that the probability has increased that futures will miss the bank’s 2012 forecast of USD3.10 per million British thermal units.

Elsewhere on the NYMEX, light sweet crude oil futures for delivery in April climbed 1.6% to trade at USD105.25 a barrel.