This week’s nor’easter tearing into the stretch between New Jersey and Maine was barely a blip on the radar at CERAWeek by IHS Markit. Folks at the Hilton Americas-Houston had their eyes on the dark clouds of a trade war on the horizon.

“Overseas exports are the only thing balancing natural gas and NGL markets, and increasingly crude oil also relies on exports to clear light-sweet volumes from U.S. shale plays,” wrote Rusty Braziel of RBN Energy LLC early in the week. The titans of global energy repeated the sentiment from the conference’s ballroom stage again and again.

“ We buy not only pipe, but we buy valves and things that aren’t manufactured in the United States,” said Greg Armstrong, CEO of Plains All American Pipeline LP (NYSE: PAA), on the first day of the event. “And so we don’t think that it would be appropriate to put a tariff on something that you can't buy here in the United States.”

China, the world’s largest steel producer, supplies about 2% of U.S. consumption. However, China is also one of the largest importers of U.S. crude, LNG and propane, Braziel noted. The possibility (read: certainty) of retaliation was unsettling in the polite ambience of the Hilton as well as in corporate energy strongholds just blocks away from the conference in downtown Houston. Remember that LNG export powerhouse Australia is a neighbor in the hemisphere.

Fluctuations in the markets didn’t help any. The near-month New York Mercantile Exchange Henry Hub price rose 9 cents per MMBtu during the five-day tracking period, but propane at Mont Belvieu, Texas, plunged 20% to its lowest point since last July.

The butanes continued to bob and weave as they have in recent weeks. Butane at Mont Belvieu fell 13% and isobutane tumbled 16%. Butanes can be thinly traded sometimes, En*Vantage said in a report. The analysts speculated that an international trader could have been caught short at the end of February, which led to a upward jolt last week. Ethane edged up just slightly and C5+ saw a 4% upturn.

The hypothetical NGL barrel at Mont Belvieu slumped 9% last week, dropping below $29 for the first time since early September.

In the week ended March 2, storage of natural gas in the Lower 48 experienced a decrease of 57 billion cubic feet (Bcf), the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported, close to the Bloomberg consensus of a 59 Bcf draw and below the five-year average of 129 Bcf. The figure resulted in a total of 1.625 trillion cubic feet (Tcf). That is 29.5% below the 2.305 Tcf figure at the same time in 2017 and 15.6% below the five-year average of 1.925 Tcf.

En*Vantage has modeled a season natural gas storage forecast of 1.41 Tcf. That model could change if colder than expected weather in the Northeast continues.

Joseph Markman can be reached at jmarkman@hartenergy.com and @JHMarkman.

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