Coal is expected to turn out into the most consumable fuel in the world by 2020 thus outrunning oil. Such a forecast was made on October 14 by William Durbin, an expert of research company Wood Mackenzie. The coal consumption is going to reach 4.5 billion tons of oil equivalent while the oil consumption will run at 4.4 billion tons only. In the meantime, in 2010 the demand for coal worldwide was 3.6 billion tons of oil equivalent and the demand for oil totaled 4 billion tons. So, the coal utilization has climbed by 1.3 billion tons since 2000.
India and China mostly facilitate the rising demand for coal; in this respect, China will account for two thirds of the consumption growth. Durbin assumes that China will rely on coal owing to its accessibility and low prices. In 2020, China will need the power of 8,600 terawatt-hour as compared to 5,000 terawatt-hour in 2012. So, coal will account for nearly 46% out of the extra 2,600 terawatt needed in China. Citing Durbin, the coal demand will be underpinned by low raw material prices and the ineffective environmental legislation in the industrialized countries including the U.S. and the E.U. countries. Wood Mackenzie’s estimates indicate that a value of a greenhouse gas emission tax in the E.U. has to be set at €40 per ton in order to prompt massive scale investments of manufacturers in new technologies. However, Wood Mackenzie supposes that the changeover to new energy sources is unlikely to take place by 2020. In December 2012, the International Energy Agency predicted that a coal share in the global power industry would be almost equal to a petroleum share in 2017. Almost 18% of Russia’s power plants burn coal.
