Environmental policy, fuel prices and the switching to natural gas in Santiago, Chile

In this study I analyze the pattern of adoption of natural gas in Chile and the drivers behind it. For doing that I have a panel data set of stationary sources from 1995 to 2005 that allows me to identify either the role of environmental policy as the impact of the energy cost inducing the switching to this clean fuel. Besides, I evaluate the performance of the system of environmental contingencies, a non- traditional policy instrument created in Chile in the early nineties, that seemed strongly correlated with the switching. According to the data most of the adoption of natural gas was induced by the lower cost of this fuel, showing that sources were more sensitive to the cost of energy than to the environmental regulation