It was a very active day in the natural gas market, as an early morning explosion of the LEX Pipeline helped the July natural gas contract rocket over 3% higher initially before prices pulled back into the late morning EIA print. An in-line EIA print that confirmed holiday-driven loosening then helped pull prices back gradually lower into the settle, though the July contract still settled about a percent higher on the day. 

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Spreads varied significantly through the day, with sizable prompt month isolation early after the pipeline explosion. The winter strip then caught a bid into the settle as the fall strip began lagging more. 

At 10:30 AM Eastern, the EIA announced that 92 bcf of gas was injected into storage last week, matching our estimate of 92 bcf perfectly. 

As we had expected and said yesterday, the result is that Memorial Day holiday demand destruction was not enough to bring about the largest storage injection of the season last week. 

Looking over the past 10 weeks, though, we can clearly see the impact of holiday demand destruction in this week's print. 

Furthering holiday demand destruction last week were nuclear outages that remained far below seasonal averages, with additional nuclear power generation limiting the need for replacement natural gas power burns. 

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In fact, by our estimate almost a whole bcf of gas (compared to the 5-year average) was displaced by above average nuclear generation today. We show the impact of this daily in our weather and nuclear-adjusted power burns, where we compare non nuclear-adjusted burns to their nuclear-adjusted counterparts. Still, burns have clearly absorbed enough supply to keep injections from swelling despite large year-on-year production growth.