Reports by the Congressional Research Service from 2008 discuss emerging policy issues regarding carbon dioxide pipelines for carbon sequestration, network needs and cost uncertainties regarding pipelines for carbon dioxide control, and jurisdictional issues in regulating carbon dioxide sequestration pipelines.
Total numbers of speakers is high: over 40 million Farsi speakers (about 60% of Iran's population); over 14 million Dari Persian speakers in Afghanistan (50% of the population according to CIA World FactBook & Britannica); and about 2 million Dari Persian speakers in Pakistan.
So, that's clearly over 1 billion people that could communicate in English to some extent. Those figures are also almost 10 years old, so we can surely say that those numbers of speakers have grown in the last decade. So, how many people speak English in the world in 2015? We can estimate that there are definitely above 1.5 billion speakers of English globally. In 2015, out of the total 195 countries in the world, 67 nations have English as the primary language of 'official status'. Plus there are also 27 countries where English is spoken as a secondary 'official' language. Look at this cool map of people who can have a conversation in English around the European Union...