The applicability of natural gas in Brazil—An analysis from an environmental and economic point of view

ABSTRACT

This work analyzes the applicability of natural gas from an environmental and economic point of view by identifying the attributes that interfere with the adoption of natural gas as an alternative energy source in companies, and by analyzing the relative productive efficiency of a set of equipment. The method used included a combination of the Critical Incident Technique, Conjoint Analysis, and Data Envelopment Analysis. The results will enable companies to measure the benefits of using this energy source and allow the Brazilian government to establish suitable strategies to stimulate the use of gas after its supply offer has been increased.

KEYWORDS:

• Conjoint Analysis
• Critical Incident Technique
• Data Envelopment Analysis
• industries
• natural gas

Notes

^1. The IPCC assesses the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for understanding the risk of human-induced climate change.

^2. The concordance index was used to check if there is a high level of agreement in the process of grouping the similar critical incidents. The concordance index equal to or above 0.8 shows a high level of agreement in the grouping process.

^3. The Spearman’s coefficient close to one shows the fit quality of the model, representing a very acceptable value. The Kendall’s tau measures the correlation between concordant and discordant pairs. It calculates how many concordant pairs there are, compared to the discordant pairs, divided by the total number of pairs, including those with the same response value.