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Gold/Mining/Energy : Oil & Gas Price Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MskiHntr who wrote (4)	12/2/1998 10:43:00 PM
From: Ed Ajootian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 350

NEW YORK, Dec 2 (Reuters) - The warmth and sunshine that has bathed most of the nation from Salt Lake City to New York City in recent days has burned up sales in some industries but has been a holiday blessing for others. Except for California and the Northwest, most of the nation has experienced temperatures 10 to 20 degrees above normal, said Dale Mohler, a senior meteorologist with Accu-Weather Inc. No amount of spin can help the energy industry, where prices have reached their lowest in decades and natural gas stockpiles are higher than in previous years, MacNeil said. ''Prices are already miserably low,'' he said. ''If you have to work off the inventory its will make them miserably lower.'' George Leibowitz, treasurer of Petroleum Heat & Power Inc., the largest U.S. heating oil retailer, said the warm weather has been a bane to the already battered energy industry. Leibowitz, whose company serves 340,000 customers from Massachusetts to Virginia, said wholesale prices are already 40 percent lower than last year. The warm weather already has ''substantially'' hurt sales, he said, but would not elaborate. According to Accu-Weather forecasts, the warm temperatures will evaporate this weekend across much of the country. In the Northeast, next week may set the stage for a cold snap by the end of the month. Richard Gross at Lehman Brothers said despite the current warm spell a normal to slightly colder-than-normal winter should wipe out the accumulating natural gas reserves.