Coal plants usually have a 50-year operational life, which means that fossil fuels will be with us for a long time. Unless we can figure out a way to take carbon out of coal — the way we've managed to clean other pollutants, like acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide, using scrubbers —we'll never beat climate change. Ergo Exergy wants to mitigate the damage. The company's underground coal gasification technology burns coal into gas directly in its underground seams, which saves the environmental cost of mining. But more importantly, by converting coal into a gas before it's burned for energy, Ergo paves the way for more easily capturing and sequestering the coal's carbon — coal needs to be gasified before carbon can be sequestered — possibly in the same underground seams where the coal can be found.