RE:EIA Projections to 2050Thanks Will1999. Unfortunately the EIA has been wrong -spectaciularly wrong...on most energy issues so quite frankly their projections are not worth reading. Read their projections for US oil from 10 year ago and look at what actually happened. They did not take into account fracking...a bit of an oversight which made all their forecasts nonsense.
The basis of their forecasts for natural gas replacing nuclear is based on price projections for natural gas. And here is why that analysis is full of holes. Firstly the natural gas produced in North America is captive meaning there is little ability to export it. That is changing rapidly. The US is set to become the largest exporter of LNG in the next few years which means that large volumes of natural gas will be liquefied and exported to Japan, Ukraine the UK and elsewhere. Politically the US is very keen to break the Russian Monolpoly of gas supplies to Eurpope and LNG is the tool they will use to do that. So Natural Gas is currently very competitive with Nuclear provided the fuel cost remains low...that is the market is constrained by consumption only in North America. In 10 years that whole picture changes as vast volumes of gas will be exported as LNG. NG plants will suddenly find that the price they pay for fuel is goiung to increase dramatically making them very uncompetitive against stable nuclear power. Nuclear on the other hand is immune from fuel price rises. NG plants will likely first replace coal rather than nuclear plants. If the price of NG remains low for the next 10 years I can see nuclear will be challenged but NG prices are notoriously volatile so do not bank on the price being low for a long time.
So do not place your eggs in the NG basket...at least not the power companies using it. A better bet is the pipeline companies like Kinder-Morgan and TransCanada. They make money whatever the price of oil or gas is.
Malcolm