Carbon dioxide is a terrible houseguest. It arrives invisibly, stays for centuries and leaves humanity arguing over the bill. Cory Sanderson has spent much of his career learning how gases behave when engineers would prefer them elsewhere. At Sustaera, the North Carolina direct-air-capture company he co-founded and now leads as CEO, his answer begins with an almost comic act of restraint: stop heating so much stuff.
Most solid-sorbent DAC systems must warm a carbon-catching material to release the CO₂ for storage. Conventional designs often bring steam, vessels and thermal infrastructure to the occasion. Sanderson offers a domestic analogy. Heating the whole chamber, he says, resembles warming an entire house for one person. Sustaera's version is the electric jacket: put resistive heat directly beside the sorbent, warm what needs warming and spare the furniture.
The jacket is a useful picture because it carries his larger argument. Carbon removal will not become practical through chemistry alone. The contactor, power supply, cycle time, manufacturing method, maintenance plan and project financing all get a vote. A material may capture CO₂ beautifully on a laboratory balance and still become an expensive diva once surrounded by industrial equipment.
“You need to go and find the market and the problem first and then develop the product and the solution that goes for that.”Cory Sanderson
An apprenticeship in invisible things
Sanderson studied chemical engineering at the University of Delaware from 2003 to 2007, where he also swam on the men's team. He then joined Air Products and moved through a compact education in industrial reality: controls, air separation, plant process engineering, hydrogen systems, adsorption and research. His patent record includes methods for separating helium, neon or argon and for removing light gases from carbon-dioxide streams. These are not cocktail-party substances. They are the quiet tenants of pipes, vessels and specifications.
One Air Products assignment placed him on a team that designed, built and started a carbon-capture and sequestration plant at million-tonne annual scale. The experience sharpened a hard lesson. Capturing CO₂ can work while the full proposition fails. Sources are often distant from useful storage. Pipelines invite cost and permitting. Each conventional component adds capital, controls and another opportunity for the spreadsheet to frown.
Useful heat reaching the sorbent
These company-reported figures describe electricity-to-heat efficiency at the sorbent, not total energy consumed per tonne of CO₂.
In 2019 he moved to Susteon, a Durham-area decarbonization incubator. There, work with Columbia University on materials that could capture CO₂ and convert it to methane ran into an inconvenient input: clean hydrogen was too expensive. The response was revealing. Rather than decorate the economics, the team narrowed the problem. Focus on capture. Design backward from the price a customer could pay. Sustaera emerged from that work in 2021.
The machine inside the jacket
Air flows through narrow channels in a ceramic monolith, a form familiar from catalytic converters. A coated structured sorbent binds the sparse CO₂ molecules passing through. When it is time to release them, electricity heats the material directly. The same assembly handles capture and regeneration, avoiding the need to shuttle material between separate pieces of equipment. The gas around it barely warms. In lab tests, Sustaera reports more than 90 percent efficiency in turning that electricity into useful heat at the sorbent.
Air in. Electricity on. Concentrated CO₂ out.
Diagram is schematic. The design integrates a conductive sorbent and electric resistive heating on a structured contactor.
The distinction matters beyond the power meter. An all-electric module can start and stop quickly. That opens a peculiar market: renewable projects waiting years for grid interconnection. A carbon-removal facility placed behind the meter could consume wind or solar generation before the grid is ready, switch individual modules with available power and create a revenue stream from otherwise stranded electrons.
Sanderson describes the desired operating personality as HVAC rather than refinery. Set it, let it run, skip the vigilant courtship of boiler temperature and pressure. The company's sorbent uses inexpensive, widely available inputs and is designed to be washed and recoated after years of cycling. Sustaera's reported target is below $100 per tonne at scale. It remains a target, and the next commercial unit must prove that a persuasive laboratory jacket survives outdoor weather, manufacturing tolerances and customer expectations.
The useful art of throwing work away
Sustaera had already collected impressive endorsements. A $10 million Series A in 2021 brought backing from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and a Grantham Trust vehicle. Stripe selected the company for an early purchase. Shopify agreed to buy 5,000 tonnes. In 2022, Sustaera won a $1 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal milestone award. Applause, however, has poor heat-transfer properties.
By 2024, Sanderson and the team concluded that the first-generation product they had spent years developing would not meet the market's requirements. They replaced it with the current nano-structured generation. This is the unphotogenic center of engineering: a functioning object can still be the wrong product. Capital cost, energy, reliability and financeability are part of the specification, even when they are absent from the beaker.
“In 2024, we realized the first-generation product we had spent years developing was not good enough to meet the market requirements.”Cory Sanderson
The business model changed with the machine. Sustaera does not plan to own and operate every carbon-removal plant. It intends to sell equipment to developers with their own expertise in sites, sequestration and infrastructure. For a small hardware team, focus is a form of financing. Inventing a material while permitting a pipeline is how two difficult companies can hide inside one letterhead.
There was a human bill for that focus. Sanderson has called the departure of early employees, when funding could no longer support the full team, his hardest founder decision. Climate technology may promise patient infrastructure, but startups still live by impatient bank balances. The people asked to solve a multi-decade problem can lose their jobs on a quarterly timetable. His account is spare and specific: every contributor helped the company reach its current position, which made telling talented people to leave no easier.
That experience helps explain his preference for a capital-light boundary. Let project developers carry the site and sequestration work. Let manufacturing partners help coat structured contactors. Keep Sustaera's payroll and attention close to the technical advantage it can defend. The approach is less romantic than owning a continental fleet of carbon farms. Romance, like steam, arrives with infrastructure attached.
- 2007
Joins Air Products after earning a chemical engineering degree. - 2019
Moves to Susteon and begins incubating the technology behind Sustaera. - 2021
Becomes a founding technology leader at the newly formed Sustaera. - 2024
Helps replace the first-generation product with an electro-thermal redesign. - 2026
Steps forward as co-founder and CEO while the company prepares commercial equipment.
A gigatonne horizon, one commute at a time
For more than four years, Sanderson wrote, he drove over an hour each way, dropping his children in Wake Forest and continuing through traffic to a small RTP lab. The route gives his planetary ambition a local map: school, interstate, bench, repeat. A founder biography says his free time belongs largely to his wife and three young children, at home, on nature walks or at the beach.
His stated long-term picture is immense: Sustaera enabling one to two gigatonnes of carbon removal each year. His daily method is deliberately smaller. Keep the next few steps in view. The optimism, he says, comes from nerdy material - data, engineering studies, commercial progress and conversations with people who understand the differences. It is optimism with a clipboard.
His reading list is similarly practical. For climate action he recommends Tom Steyer's Cheaper, Faster, Better; for founders, Suneel Gupta's Backable; for a glimpse of climate politics under pressure, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. The titles form a tidy triangle of his public character: reduce the cost, persuade the room, remember the stakes. His mantra is blunter still: “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” It is not the usual hymn to delegation, though it fits a founder who moved from controls cabinets to patent filings to a tabletop DAC demonstration.
The sacrifice is personal enough to escape mission-statement varnish. Sanderson says he thinks about his children and wants them to inherit a healthy, habitable environment with experiences at least as good as his. Asked to teleport into the future, he chose Hawaii in 2050, surfing with his family on the beach or in the water after society has reached a sustainable economy and balanced emissions with removals.
Before that postcard comes a commercial test. Sustaera has discussed equipment deployments with developers including Deep Sky and Return Carbon. It must scale the conductive structured sorbent, secure financing and show that its reported lab advantages travel. Climate hardware is mercilessly literal. A molecule either moves or it does not. A tonne costs what it costs. The boiler room, regrettably, does not accept vibes.
Sanderson's contribution is a way of seeing the machine whole. He learned among large gas systems, watched cost and infrastructure overpower clever chemistry, and returned with an insistence on designing from the customer's problem inward. Heat the sorbent. Manufacture the cartridge. Let project developers develop projects. Give intermittent electricity somewhere useful to go.
If the approach works, carbon removal may become less photogenic: banks of modular equipment humming beside renewable generation, attended by ordinary maintenance schedules and tolerable debt. For a technology charged with repairing an atmospheric imbalance, dullness would be a magnificent personality.