As Energy and Resources executive director in South Australia where the likes of Santos, Beach Energy and Senex are racing to develop shale gas opportunities, Goldstein has as much reason as anyone to see the end of coal – yet his view is decisively more nuanced.

It could be because his state is a major backer of geothermal – a passion that Goldstein personally shares – and strongly supports carbon capture and storage research body CO2CRC.

Global momentum seems to be building against coal ahead of the UN Conference of Parties (COP21) meeting in Paris in November, with the Greens forming an odd alliance with Big Oil to phase out coal – a strategy that is sure to come back to bite the latter. No doubt Big Oil will be next on the agenda if anti-coal activists get what they want.

Yet in a lengthy chat with Energy News on gas’ escalating war on coal, Goldstein, a petroleum geologist for more than 40 years, revealed a confidence in the fossil fuels industry that lay in the middle ground that balanced environmentalists’ concerns with global realities.

Thus, he was not surprised at European Big Oil’s statement last month calling for UN support for the world’s governments to implement connected carbon pricing systems to eliminate coal so it can ride to the developing world’s rescue to lift it out of poverty.

This call was backed by Woodside CEO Peter Coleman, in a stinging attack on coal that curiously put him at odds with his North West Shelf joint venturer, major coal producer BHP Billiton.

While Goldstein said it was no secret “there’s a vested interest in gas vendors to kill coal”, he said this view ignored local realities in Australia, which had a delicate balance to make between finding smarter, cleaner ways to source energy without killing coal, a major export earner.

“If everybody who lives on this island we call Australia departed and there was no further human, industrial or agricultural activity, in regard to the world’s budget for greenhouse gas no-one would notice,” Goldstein said.

He said that despite being a high emitter per capita, Australia’s relatively low population meant it “doesn’t really line up” as “the key threat to mitigating climate change”

However, Goldstein believes societies that can afford to do something about mitigating climate change should, even as the public debate appears to be “how we can afford that, and what the trajectory of reducing greenhouse gas emissions should be”

“Doing something symbolic in Australia [such as carbon pricing] without seeing kindred activity in other countries has not got the right outcome that we’re trying to attain,” he said, echoing the thoughts of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson who believed consumers would never back such a mechanism.

“If you’re trying to balance prosperity in Australia with environmental conservation globally, the answer is to work hard towards international agreements, develop technologies that can help mitigate emissions at lowest cost, learn how to adapt to higher temperatures just in case we don’t mitigate them, and do all of those all of things all at once and if you can, turn them into businesses for the country.”

While Goldstein believes there is “no silver bullet” to mitigating climate change, he can see a future where a combination of energy storage is utilised with low emissions technologies – be they renewable or non-renewable – but making them affordable is the biggest challenge.

“It’s just really not appropriate to say that ‘we’re going to save the planet and push everybody into energy poverty’,” Goldstein said.

With the World Coal Association heavily promoting the use of supercritical and ultra-supercritical coal-fired plants as efficient, emission-saving alternatives, the race is on to find sustainable energy solutions.

Goldstein is happy to concede that “if somebody comes up with a really inexpensive battery storage system to store wind energy when it’s not windy and to store solar energy when it’s not sunny, and if hybrid cars come down their cost curve, you could see, regardless of greenhouse gas issues, a lot of people moving towards fuels other than oil and gas for both transport and stationary energy, simply because it makes them feel better”

The phenomenal amount of solar panels seen on Australian rooftops these days shows this is already occurring, however, the need for low-cost energy has perversely lowered lower-emissive gas demand and also driven the rise of higher-emissive but cheaper coal demand.

This, Goldstein believes, is where European majors Shell, BP, BG Group, Statoil, Total and Eni are coming from in their call for carbon pricing.

“They’re saying that in existing markets, gas is getting wedged except where gas is super inexpensive like in the US right now,” he said.

“Gas is still pretty expensive in Europe.”

That said, Goldstein does not believe there is any chance coal will not be around in 50 years time – but warned the industry needed to “clean up its act” at an affordable price.

In this, he cited the famous quote from Sheikh Zaki Yamani, who served as Saudi Arabia’s oil minister four decades ago: “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil”

To this, Goldstein added: “We’ll still have plenty of oil and gas in the ground, when some other technology becomes just as efficient and lower-priced – just like, in some ways, whale oil got supplanted by coal, coal is purportedly being supplanted by gas, solar, wind and nuclear.

“People will adopt new energy when it’s the best bang for buck, and the cost of solar panels is coming down, and I don’t know that coal [-fired energy] is coming down at the same pace.”

Then there was the emerging issue of linking transport with home heating and power through storage from solar cells, and recharging cars, which could impact on oil demand.

Amid all this hypothetical crystal ball-gazing, Goldstein’s essential belief is thus: “I personally believe we’re going to be using an awful lot of fossil fuels for centuries, but I also fully expect there will be technological advantages that will make energy sources much wider at a lower cost, and it won’t be simply ‘we can’t afford it’.”