Study on the price elasticity problem of China's coal supply and demand

China is a big energy consuming country, the present situation of being rich in coal and poor in oil determines the important role of coal in our economic development. In this paper, the basic elasticity theory in economics is used for the coal supply and demand researches of china,which better and objectively reflects the complicated and confused coal supply and demand, price and the alternative energy resource price and their interrelationship. This work have important significances for implementation the coal price formation, energy saving and emission reduction policies. The results show that although our coal supply and demand market has gradually liberalized, but due to the limit of energy consumption structure and technology level, our coal supply and demand price elasticity is lower and investment costs of substitution energy resource are high which means that in our country, the short-term energy resource consumption is still mainly dependent on coal.