Sustaera Reports 90 Percent Efficiency in Direct Air Capture, Claiming a Path to Sub-$100-Per-Ton Carbon Removal
The North Carolina startup says its electro-thermal sorbent system operates at more than double the efficiency of thermal competitors, with 3-5x lower capital costs, after years of DOE-backed development.
The Claim
Sustaera, a Research Triangle Park-based startup, announced in March 2026 that its proprietary direct air capture (DAC) system has achieved over 90 percent operational efficiency, more than doubling the roughly 40 percent ceiling that conventional thermal DAC technologies have reached. The company says its electro-thermal approach, which pairs a nano-structured sorbent with integrated electric resistive heating, delivers 3 to 5 times lower capital costs than competing methods.
“We’ve recently achieved 90%+ efficiency, using far less capital than traditional thermal approaches, and we’re still innovating,” CTO Cory Sanderson stated in the announcement.
The results place Sustaera on what the company describes as a credible path to sub-$100-per-ton carbon removal, a threshold widely regarded as necessary for DAC to compete at scale with other decarbonization strategies.
Technology and Backers
Sustaera spun out of chemical engineering firm Susteon and closed a $10 million Series A round in December 2021 led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate fund backed by Bill Gates, and the Grantham Trust’s Neglected Climate Opportunities fund. The company uses an alkali-based sorbent material derived from an abundantly available natural mineral, and its process runs entirely on electricity rather than requiring fossil fuel heat sources.
Unlike liquid solvent systems or high-temperature solid sorbent approaches, Sustaera’s design uses no water and produces pure water as a byproduct, a characteristic CEO Ben Gardner highlighted as advantageous for deployment in water-stressed regions. “Developers can now capture carbon cost-effectively, whether for sequestration or utilization. The technology is beautifully simple,” Gardner said.
The company has also been selected as one of 15 teams, from a pool of 1,133 entrants, to receive a $1 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal milestone prize, and has secured purchase agreements from Stripe and Shopify.
Industry Context
Sustaera’s announcement arrives as the broader DAC sector faces a reckoning over cost and scalability. The U.S. Department of Energy has committed billions to Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs, with Sustaera named as a technology provider for the Ankeron Hub project in the Pacific Northwest. Meanwhile, 1PointFive’s STRATOS facility in West Texas, backed by Occidental Petroleum, is progressing toward commissioning at a planned capacity of 500,000 tonnes per year.
The federal Section 45Q tax credit offers up to $180 per tonne for CO2 permanently stored via DAC under the Inflation Reduction Act, a subsidy that remains essential for most projects at current cost levels. Sustaera’s claim of a path to sub-$100-per-ton removal, if validated at commercial scale, would represent a significant step toward economic viability independent of that subsidy.
What Remains Unproven
Sustaera’s 90 percent efficiency figure and cost projections have not yet been independently verified at scale. The company is currently in advanced talks with carbon removal project developers and has adopted a licensing model, but no large-scale commercial facility using its third-generation technology has been built. The gap between laboratory-validated performance and field deployment at thousands of tonnes per year has historically proven difficult for DAC startups to close. Whether Sustaera can maintain its efficiency and cost advantages as it scales will be the critical test in the months ahead.