re: gas prices Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Natural gas futures in New...

re: gas prices Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Natural gas futures in New York rose for a second day after a government report showed that supplies declined the most in a year, as cold weather spurred demand for the heating fuel.

U.S. stockpiles dropped 195 billion cubic feet in the week ended Jan. 30, the biggest decline since Feb. 1, 2008, the Energy Department said. Prices also rose on forecasts that below-normal temperatures will cover much of the country late next week.

“It has been unbelievably cold in the Midwest,” said Tom Orr, research director at Weeden & Co. in Greenwich, Connecticut. “I don’t see a catalyst to take gas much higher.”

Natural gas for March delivery rose 4.7 cents, or 1 percent, to $4.644 per million British thermal units at the 2:30 p.m. close of floor trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gas has declined 17 percent this year and is 66 percent lower than the 2008 high of $13.694 per million Btu reached on July 2.

“Today’s data tells me there doesn’t seem to be any further deterioration in industrial and power generation demand,” said Cameron Horwitz, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. in Houston. “It’s still weak, though there’s a bit of a leveling off. We’re not looking into a black hole in terms of industrial demand.”

Fuel uses by factories and manufacturers will drop almost 1 billion cubic feet a day, or 6 percent, this year from 2008, Horwitz said in a report yesterday. Demand in November averaged 18 billion cubic feet a day, down 4.3 percent from a year earlier, the Energy Department said last week. Industrial consumption accounted for 29 percent of U.S. demand in 2007.

Economic Recovery

Economic stimulus plans by the world’s 20 biggest developed and emerging economies may spur growth next year in those counties, which includes the U.S., by as much as 1.3 percentage points, the International Monetary Fund said today.

An economic recovery would help to revive demand for energy.

Inventories totaled 2.179 trillion cubic feet last week, 0.8 percent higher than the five-year average for that time of year, today’s report showed. The surplus was 1.2 percent in last week’s report.

“The 8-to-14-day forecast is looking more bullish than it had over the past couple of days,” said Lisa Zembrodt, an analyst at Summit Energy Services Inc. in Louisville, Kentucky. “The forecast could provide support because it’s such a change from expectations of milder weather.”

Above-normal temperatures are expected in the Northeast and Midwest in the early part of next week, though those will begin to dissipate by Feb. 12, Joe Bastardi, a meteorologist at AccuWeather in State College, Pennsylvania, said in a note.

Much of the U.S. will have “an unseasonably cold late winter pattern, more normal for late January than late February, in the last two weeks of the month,” he said.

Lower temperatures can lift demand for gas as a heating fuel. About 52 percent of U.S. households rely on gas to meet their heating needs, according to the Energy Department.