In recent weeks, the reduced maintenance downtime of the US nuclear power reactor fleet has been offsetting natural gas demand at a level far above last year.
If the entire difference in nuclear generation output were replaced by natural gas fired power, it would yield about 7 BCF on last week's EIA natural gas inventory report, and for the current week (ending today), it would be closer to 12 BCF. That's a tremendous amount of offset demand. As winter gets underway and the capacity factors for both '15 and '16 approach 100%, this differential should diminish or reverse, which ought to significantly improve the supply/demand balance for natural gas.
