The natural gas market continues to press higher, with bullish weather forecasts allowing the November natural gas contract to log another gain of just less than 3%. Most of this came later in the day, when weather models turned back even more bullish.
The importance of these weather forecasts is compounded by natural gas storage levels that sit outside the 5-year range nationally and demand that continues to be impressive. Part of this is due to a surge in nuclear outages the last few weeks. In one of our live chats for susbcribers back on September 11th, we warned that nuclear outages were about to increase markedly which would help set a short-term bottom for prices (back when the November contract was around $2.81).
Sure enough, those nuclear outages arrived in force, and have resulted in significant increases in natural gas burns for power.
This comes with additional outages likely to persist, as though they are very elevated over the past month we still see far fewer outages through 2018 thus far than we saw through the same point last year.
These nuclear outages have helped keep demand higher and thus kept physical gas prices elevated as well, with the timing of a significant Henry Hub cash rally fitting with the first spike in nuclear outages.
Front spreads have narrowed as a result too.
Of course, bullish weather expectations through October has furthered this more recent weather rally, and afternoon model guidance did turn markedly colder, as seen on this GEFS surface temperature anomaly output from Tropical Tidbits.
Yet there is little doubt that strong nuclear outages have helped contribute as well.
