OREANDA-NEWS. November 21, 2012. By replacing natural gas with coal of domestic production Ukraine will significantly reduce the consumption of expensive imported natural gas. This was started by Minister of Energy and Coal Industry of Ukraine Yuriy Boyko on air of the Inter TV channel.

"We’ve increased coal production in Ukraine for two years by 10 million tons. Now we have a surplus of coal. But this is good because we will use it at the factories for processing coal into gas. Several of these companies will be built in the mining regions and we will replace by 10 million tons of coal about 4 billion cubic meters of gas, which is now we forced to import", Yuriy Boyko said.

He also noted that since the spring of this year, Ukraine has stopped to use gas for electricity production and switched to production of electricity from coal of domestic production.