A grey forecasting model for coal production and consumption

China has already become world's largest coal producer and consumer. China's production in 2006 roughly equaled the combined production of the next four top producers (the United States, India, Australia and Russia). The dynamic GM(1,1) model of grey theory is used to forecast the coal production and consumption in China. In order to improve the forecast accuracy, the original GM(1, 1) models are improved by using Markov-chain. We analyze the data of the coal production and consumption from 1990 to 2007 in China, and forecast China's coal production and consumption by this Grey-Markov forecasting model, which shows that the improved grey forecasting model is of more reliability and higher forecast accuracy than GM (1, 1). And the forecast results indicate that China's coal production and consumption will continue to increase rapidly in the period of 2008 to 2015.