US natural gas futures were little changed on Thursday following a government report showing last week's storage build was in line with expectations. That lack of price movement came despite short-term forecasts for cooler weather and higher demand over the next two weeks.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) said utilities injected 109 billion cubic feet (bcf) of gas into storage during the week ended May 1.
That was in line with the 106-bcf build analysts forecast in a Reuters poll and compares with an increase of 96 bcf during the same week last year and a five-year (2015-19) average build of 74 bcf for the period.
The increase last week boosted stockpiles to 2.319 trillion cubic feet (tcf), 20.5% above the five-year average of 1.924 tcf for this time of year. Front-month gas futures for June delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 0.6 cent, or 0.3%, to $1.950 per million British thermal units at 10:49 a.m. EDT (1449 GMT).
This has been a volatile week for US gas. Prices jumped to a 16-week high on Tuesday after a big pipe shut and on slowing output, but fell almost 9% on Wednesday, the biggest percentage decline in over a year, after the market failed to break above the 200-day moving average and on forecasts government lockdowns to stop the coronavirus spread will cut demand and exports.
That price increase on Tuesday briefly made the US front-month the most expensive of the world's major benchmarks for the first time ever, ahead of the Title Transfer Facility (TTF) in the Netherlands and the Japan/Korea Marker (JKM), both of which are trading near record lows.
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