Sirona Technologies has suspended operations at Project Moringa, its 300-tonne-per-year direct air capture pilot in the Middle East, and is redirecting resources to the Furu DACCS project in Norway, where CO2 offtake infrastructure and European carbon market reform are converging into a bankable storage pathway.

The company launched Project Moringa in late 2025 to validate its DAC technology in real-life conditions. The initial capture capacity was 300 tonnes of CO2 per year, with plans to scale the installation in 2026. The site sat in an Omani territory inside the United Arab Emirates, where Sirona drew on abundant local solar generation to power its energy-intensive capture systems.

That plan is now on hold. Escalating conflict in the region has made it unsafe to deploy staff to the site, Sirona co-founder and CEO Thoralf Gutierrez said in an interview with Carbon Herald.

The policy signal that moved the portfolio

The pivot to Norway is not purely a security decision. The European Commission has proposed integrating carbon removals into the EU Emissions Trading System, a reform that would attach a compliance-market price signal to tonnes of durable removal. That proposal gives developers an incentive to site capture capacity where captured CO2 can be verifiably stored — and Sirona's Furu project sits in exactly that position.

Announced in May 2026, Project Furu is located at the Energy Park industrial site in Øygarden on Norway's west coast. The park is developed by CCB Energy and sits next to the Northern Lights CO2 receiving terminal, the cross-border transportation and storage infrastructure backed by the Norwegian government. Co-location with Northern Lights means Sirona can move CO2 captured at Furu to permanent storage beneath the North Sea seabed without building its own midstream chain — typically the costliest and slowest element of any DACCS project.

Norway also brings demand-side support. National government funding and EU carbon removal purchasing initiatives have made the country increasingly attractive for DAC deployment, according to the company.

What Moringa delivered before the shutdown

Sirona is framing the Middle East pause as a partial technical win rather than a write-off. During its operating period, Project Moringa achieved a 35% reduction in energy consumption across the capture process, Gutierrez said. A next-generation Sirona machine now running in Belgium — built using lessons from the Oman deployment — has delivered a further 30% in energy savings.

Energy intensity is the metric that decides whether DAC-produced removals can clear CDR offtake prices. A cumulative improvement of that scale across two machine generations, if it holds at larger capacity, materially changes the levelized cost per tonne.

The company has not written off the region. Gutierrez said Sirona still views the Middle East as favorable for DAC development given its solar resources, and the project could be revisited in the future.

Sirona has also built a commercial track record alongside the hardware work: the company previously secured a carbon dioxide removal agreement facilitated by Patch, adding contracted offtake to its operating credentials.

What to watch

Two milestones now govern Sirona's trajectory. The first is legislative: the European Commission's proposal to bring carbon removals into the EU ETS must clear the EU legislative process before compliance demand materializes for Furu's tonnes. The second is operational — the pace at which Furu connects capture capacity to the Northern Lights storage chain at Øygarden, and at what annual tonnage the Belgian machine's energy gains translate into delivered, stored CO2.

Until the ETS integration lands, Furu's economics rest on voluntary CDR purchases and Norwegian state support. Once it lands, the project's adjacency to an operating storage terminal positions it among the first DAC installations able to sell into a regulated carbon market.