(Bloomberg) -- Natural-gas futures rose 13 percent amid concern that colder-than-normal weather in the U.S. Midwest and Northeast will continue to drain supplies in storage.
``This cold-weather trend is going to keep drawdown numbers stellar,'' said John Kilduff, senior vice president of energy-risk management at Fimat USA Inc. in New York. ``It's really an amazing turnaround from worrying late last summer where we would put the gas and now not having enough.''
Gas for April delivery surged $1 to $8.485 per million British thermal units at 10:10 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The April contract rose 1.3 percent yesterday.
Below-average temperatures this winter in the eastern and central U.S. have slashed gas inventories in storage by 48 percent from a year earlier and 33 percent from the five-year average. The cold will persist in the next two weeks in the Midwest and next week in the East, forecasters said.
Spot gas at the Henry Hub in Louisiana rose $3.40, or 40 percent, to $11.80 per million British thermal units because of the weather forecasts. It had dropped 57 percent in the past two days from a record $19.38 on Tuesday.
Gas in storage, kept thousands of feet under the earth's surface in aquifers, salt caverns and depleted oil reservoirs, fell 154 billion cubic feet, or 13 percent, to 1.014 trillion cubic feet last week, the Energy Department said yesterday. Analysts had predicted a decline of 158 billion or 14 percent.
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