Cost Containment International president Hans Herrmann spent this past weekend up in Walworth County, Wisconsin, at the first annual EcoFair360. C2 was a primary sponsor of this three-day celebration of all things green, which brought more than 2,000 attendees together with hundreds of exhibitors and presenters. Cost Containment International had a booth in the sponsor tent, and Mr. Herrmann gave two separate presentations.

He also picked up a little something for dinner.

What you see here is (perhaps) the future of the one-pot meal. This is a SUN over, an oven which cooks exclusively using the energy from the sun. It’s an old concept, as anyone who has used a magnifying glass to start a fire knows. With the SUN oven, reflective panels focus and concentrate the sun’s rays into a central cooking chamber, where it can easily hit and maintain temperatures of 350° and higher. Look closely and you can see the dutch oven in the chamber.

Dinner in this case was chicken, and reports are that it was both well done…and done well.

We’ll start by saying that the weekly storage report came in on the low end of projections, with a 51 Bcf injection, and that storage lost ground to both last year’s record levels and the five-year average. What else is new?

NYMEX is pretty much standing pat. The market opened the day jumping up fifty cents, to $4.63, and it seems poised to end there as well.

Once again, NYMEX is bucking conventional logic. The reports have been consistent over the past two months, enough to convince even the most skeptical investor that supply and demand have pretty much hit parity. Further proof can be found in the spot market, which has risen to equal footing with the futures market…in fact, at the moment, it is even slightly higher. Summer is still hot, the Gulf is awaiting its next major storm, supply is clearly in check. This would be a good time for another run about $5.00.

It does not appear, however, that NYMEX is in the mood for another run. NYMEX appears to be in the mood to stay right where it is for the moment.

Cold feet again? Probably. NYMEX’s push above $5.00 back in June resulted in a substantial backslide, which only reversed itself in time for last week’s post. Since then, trading has been active, but the overall market has been stable. At this point the market has held steady for slightly more than a week…if the trend of the past few months holds, we are due for our next jump any day now. With more than a month left in what could well be the hottest Summer on record, we’d expect that to be a jump up. But for the moment, where it’s at is where NYMEX is at.