Natural Gas futures edged higher in the morning as power has been restored for several million households in the northeast; however, the number of households without power is still high (6.6million). Another fact that is currently limiting the downside is the elevated number of nuclear plant outages. Additional nuclear capacity was lost due to Sandy. Currently, the number of outages is ~36% higher than the five year average for this time of the year.
By the end of the day, early gains were erased as traders balanced expected demand vs. outages.
Regarding supply, inventories rose last week to 3.843TCF, which is a record high for this time of the year. This number is 9Bcf below the all time record, which was set last year. Tomorrow we are expecting a healthy injection in the vicinity of 70Bcf. If our prediction is correct, the injection for the week ending on 10/26/12 would be well above that of the 5-year average (57Bcf) for the same week.
