<p><br /></p><p>@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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>For more details, visit: https://www.sustaera.com/</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>To stay updated on all things geoengineering-related, subscribe to:</p><p>Carbon Removal Updates Substack: https://carbonremovalupdates.substack.com/</p><p>Solar Geoengineering Updates Substack: https://solargeoengineeringupdates.substack.com/</p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>