EU Innovation Fund Backs First DACCS Project: Sirona's Furu Gets €9.1 Million

The EU Innovation Fund has awarded up to €9.1 million ($10.2 million) to Sirona Technologies' Project Furu in Norway — the first direct air capture and carbon storage (DACCS) project ever selected for the fund's support.

The grant covers two project phases and funds up to nine capture containers with a combined nameplate capacity of 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. The first capture containers arrive in Norway in 2027.

Project Furu sits at CCB Energy's Energy Park in Øygarden, where the captured atmospheric CO2 will move through the onshore terminal CarbonLink to the Northern Lights infrastructure for permanent storage roughly 2,600 metres below the North Sea seabed.

How the selection played out

Furu emerged from a field of 358 applicants to the EU funding call announced in December 2025. It is one of 16 pilot-level initiatives selected from 77 winning projects sharing a €3.4 billion ($3.8 billion) pool across 23 countries of the European Economic Area.

Announcing the results, Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra said: "These projects show that Europe's innovators are turning climate ambition into industrial leadership."

For the Innovation Fund, that leadership now explicitly includes engineered removals. The category had never received a grant from the fund before this round.

What does the money build?

Sirona manufactures its DAC machines on a production line in Brussels and ships them to Øygarden. There, CCB Energy partners with Øygarden municipality and Vestland County to provide the land, utilities and shared CO2 infrastructure that projects such as Furu require.

The company's modular approach is the core pitch. Capture containers can be deployed quickly and with less capital than a single large plant. The grant funds the first nine of them, in two phases: Sirona's team runs operations in phase one, gathers performance data, then designs and builds phase two.

Sirona co-founder Thoralf Gutierrez said: "The design is sorbent-agnostic, so we can change the sorbent as better materials become available. We also use a two-stage heat pump to reduce energy consumption."

Drawing on DAC deployments in Kenya and the Middle East, Sirona has designed Furu as Europe's reference case for modular DACCS. The reference case now has a delivery date: containers on Norwegian soil in 2027.

Why the compliance market matters

Furu is compatible with both voluntary and compliance carbon markets. The project already sells credits to sustainability-orientated companies, and it is preparing for demand through the EU's proposed mechanisms.

Gutierrez said: "The project is designed for certification under the EU's CRCF framework. It is also designed for the purchasing programme the Commission has proposed in its ETS review, under which the EU would buy 250 million tonnes of permanent removals between 2031 and 2040."

The company has set its scaling milestones accordingly.

• Grow beyond 10,000 tonnes per year of capture in the coming years
• Reach that scale before applying to the EU's removals purchasing programme
• Use offtakes from that programme to build plants exceeding 100,000 tonnes per year

"Our plan is to keep building credibility with real deployments that deliver," Gutierrez said. "That credibility helps us grow voluntary demand, which will let us scale our projects."

What to track next

The verdict on this round is simple: 4,000 tonnes per year is small, but a first is a first. The milestones that decide what follows are the 2027 container deliveries, the phase-two build decision, and the final design of the EU's 250-million-tonne removals purchasing programme.