The paper attempts to answer the question what the future situation of hard coal in the energy balance can be in Poland. It requires the detailed analysis of many issues affecting this. The most important of them are: the economy development influencing increase the demand for electricity and heat production, a possibility of hard coal extraction (coal reserves, new investments, geological conditions moving up the cost of production) and new emissions regulations that have been implemented in the power sector. In order to provide reliable results a proper methodology, specifically defined for different processes and markets, should be applied. Therefore, apart from expert judgments and statistical analysis (both appropriate for trends of coal consumption estimation), suitable for relatively stable markets, the modelling approach was employed, which seems to be useful to assess the economic and structural changes which are typical for the dynamic processes, that the Polish economy faces. For the most probable scenarios, based on the research assumptions presented in the paper, the hard coal balance up to 2020 has been formed. Looking at to results one can say that significant role of coal should be maintained in the Polish economy, no matter what development assumption is considered. The predicted consumption of coal up to 2010 is on the same level as now (about 100 mln tons yearly). Moreover, the expected growing demand for electricity creates an opportunity for coal suppliers and their total production should be on the same level. What is more, new investments in the coal sector in order to increase the total capacity of Polish coal mines - in the light of presented results - seems to be economically effective (wys _ eko _ mid and wys _ eko _high scenarios ). The potential increase of coal consumption for wys _ eko _high scenario up to 2015 and more is assumed to 7-8 mln tons. It is worth to stress that the growing demand for coal is observed even within the scope of restrictive environmental standards to be in force in the Polish energy sector, the main consumer of coal. Precisely, this statement is in the strong opposition with the most experts opinion expressed in the official reports and papers.