Sustaera - electric DAC

@geoengineering1 interviews Cory Sanderson, CTO and co-founder of Sustaera, a North Carolina-based Direct Air Capture (DAC) startup focused on low-cost carbon capture, separations chemistry, and process scale-up.

Sanderson traces his journey from Air Products, where he worked on vacuum swing adsorption CO₂ capture for an SMR hydrogen plant and encountered economic and infrastructure constraints, to founding Sustaera. He also explains the company’s shift from CO₂-to-methane materials, which depended on costly clean hydrogen, to a pure DAC approach.

He then outlines Sustaera’s system, which utilises a fixed, cartridge-based monolithic contactor with laminar-flow channels and a conductive, structured sorbent that integrates resistive (Joule) heating directly into the material, thereby improving efficiency, stability, and regeneration speed.

He highlights the novelty of the design, noting that Sustaera has achieved over 90% heating efficiency in lab tests, 20-30 minute adsorption cycles, and multi-year sorbent lifetimes. With a modular, catalytic-converter-style manufacturing approach, the company is currently at TRL 5, has pre-sold removals at $700/ton to Stripe and Shopify, and is raising $8.6M to build its first outdoor commercial unit.

For more details, visit: https://www.sustaera.com/

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