Allan Blood has made a lot of money and achieved personal success with coal.

And no, that isn’t a tall poppy type statement. It’s a fact. He has every right to be upbeat about the prospects for Victoria’s vast reserves of much-maligned brown coal.

His company, Australian Power and Energy Ltd (APEL), proposed to use new technologies to develop a lower-emissions power station while also turning coal into diesel. APEL was a project-specific company, its only interest the new $5 billion Latrobe Valley-based power and coal-to-liquid scheme. In 2004, APEL’s 260 shareholders on-sold the company, the project and the coal licence to the international Anglo American. Last week, Blood confirmed the company sold for more than $100 million. He won’t tell how much he made, but he does not deny he did well. So personal success aside what was it that made him go after such a strange and specific business?

Mounting concerns about climate change did not deter him from following an entrepreneur opportunity. The West Australian resources entrepreneur paints a rosy picture of his dream of a future in which the Victorian Government gets its policies ”right”: when it opens up its coalfields for a range of uses, not just for burning in local power stations; when it approves the use of caverns under Gippsland to store the gases that come from the ”cleaning” of coal; and when it helps build a vast network of pipes and other infrastructure to carry with ease coal gas and products for export.

Perhaps his personal success will guarantee other utopian visions and spur him to dream even greater dreams