TRANSIÇÃO ENERGÉTICA E EXPLORAÇÃO DE GÁS NATURAL NO MARANHÃO: possibilidades e limites a partir de 2013.

Abstract

The importance of Natural Gas in world is growing, with highlights to its efficiency and competitiveness, reaching the point of being considered the fuel of energy transition to a less carbonized matrix. When it comes to energy transition, a change in the profile of energy consumption is can be observed throughout the development of capitalism. What was an economy based on firewood and charcoal, facing the shortage of resources becomes supplied by mineral coal, that by technological limitations gives space to oil, perhaps the energy source with greater geopolitical strength witnessed until current days. The transition that shall happen in the next years will not be due to paucity or any other technological limitations of oil, but because since the world has become more rigorous and is uniting efforts so that the pollution level, largely due to the use of fossil energy sources, can reduce in order to maintain the future development of nations. In these terms, the natural gas launches as the most appropriated fuel to energy transition, keeping in sight its property of less polluting, reduced cost and high productivity. In Brazil, the energy matrix diversification model, predicting the growth of natural gas supply happened only at the beginning of XXI century, demanding a specific regulation mark so the private agents could also operate its industry and the costs of investments in specific assets could minimize. In the last four years, Maranhão became an important hub of natural gas production, benefiting from the opening of the industry to private agents. One of main questions of this research refers to the use of this input into the industry, having as reference three scenarios of princes into the internal energy market competition. To identify and forecast demand for natural gas into the selected sub-sectors is used as basis the GEE-matrix introduced by Braga (2015) and to measure the environmental impacts is used as reference the Montes (2000) method. Finally, it is proven that the insertion of natural gas into the state's industrial matrix is capable of generating economic, social and environmental gains for the population of Maranhão.