NEWS
Sustaera’s novel direct air capture technology selected for $1M XPRIZE Milestone Award
APRIL 22, 2022
Sustaera is thrilled to announce, of the 1,133 teams that participated in the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, we have been selected as one of the top 15 teams to receive a $1M Milestone Prize.
Per the latest IPCC report, reducing emissions is no longer enough, historical emissions and hard to abate sectors can only be managed through carbon removal. Our XPRIZE application focused on two core tenets – cost and scale. With our unique sorbent based on an abundantly available natural mineral, innovative regenerative heating, and our modular component design, we demonstrated our vision to achieve megatonne, and eventually gigatonne scale at less than $100 / tonne. We applaud the Musk Foundation and the 70+ expert reviewers and the broader XPrize team for leading such a game-changing competition and look forward to competing for the grand prize in 2025.
Since spinning out of Susteon in 2021, the Sustaera team, with funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the Grantham Trust, has established early partnerships with the Department of Energy, Stripe, Shopify and now XPRIZE. These partnerships provide a market signal that carbon removal is critical to achieving our net zero targets.
“This milestone award will help us develop the engineering design for a 10-ton CO 2 per day demonstration unit by 2024. We thank the XPRIZE team for their support, and we can’t wait to demonstrate our technology to capture 1000+ tons/year for the grand prize”, said Raghubir Gupta, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sustaera.
Read the official press release here
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About Sustaera
Based in Cary, North Carolina, Sustaera is a Direct Air Capture technology startup with expertise in carbon capture, separations chemistry and process scale-up. Sustaera’s mission is to deliver low-cost, scalable, carbon removal systems to the world to “Restore the Carbon Balance.” with a target to remove 500 million tonnes of CO2 by 2040. Sustaera’s core technology is based on several breakthroughs in material science, process design, and modular manufacturing. The company is building a 1-ton CO2 /day pilot unit in North Carolina in 2022.
About XPRIZE
XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement, delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world’s grandest challenges in exploration, environment, and human equity. Active competitions include the $100 Million XPRIZE Carbon Removal with Elon Musk, $15 Million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion, $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest, $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling, and $1 Million Digital Learning Challenge. Donate, sign up or join a team at xprize.org.
About The Musk Foundation
The Musk Foundation creates grants made in support of renewable energy research and advocacy; human space exploration research and advocacy; pediatric research; science and engineering education; and development of safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.