Sirona’s Thor Gutierrez: Iterating At Pace In Carbon Capture & Storage

In the race to engineer a more sustainable future, few technologies are as audacious – or arguably as necessary – as Direct Air Capture. At the forefront of this movement is Thor Gutierrez, a Belgian entrepreneur whose five-year stint at Tesla in Silicon Valley left him with a taste for speed, iteration, and execution against the odds. After absorbing the Bay Area’s relentless drive, Gutierrez packed up his lessons and returned to Belgium, determined to build something that could help accelerate humanity’s fight against climate change.

The result is Sirona Technologies, a company that’s reimagining how we pull CO2 from the air and store it safely.

With a lean team and a modular approach, Gutierrez is betting that Europe’s engineering talent and a new wave of climate urgency can help turn Sirona into a global leader in carbon removal.

Last month, Sirona announced plans to develop a flagship European Direct Air Capture with Carbon Storage (DACCS) facility in Øygarden, western Norway, targeting a capture capacity of more than 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year by 2029.

In this Voices That Matter interview from Autumn 2025, Thor talks about approaching carbon capture projects in a different way, the reality of reducing emissions vs achieving net zero, and bringing the ambition, drive and experiences from Silicon Valley to Europe’s new Palo Alto.

Q Before we talk about Sirona Technologies and your approach to innovation, tell me what Direct Air Capture (DAC) is and why you see it being a critical technology to help create a more liveable future.

A Our mission is to tackle climate change. When you think about climate change, the first thing we need to do is to reduce emissions. But we also know that we won’t get to zero emissions. There’s always going to be a long tail of emissions, and for those emissions, there is no other way than to remove CO2 from the air to compensate for them, and so that’s what we do.

We basically build machines that remove CO2 from the air. That’s what you call Direct Air Capture (DAC).

Q What is the problem with the traditional approach to carbon capture and how are you addressing that at Sirona?

A What we saw is that a lot of the other companies were basically inventing completely new ways of removing CO2 from the air. The risk with that is you may never actually see it implemented in the real world. We wanted to do Direct Air Capture, starting from a point that worked and then go down the cost curve by iterating as quickly as we could. Another thing we saw is that a lot of the incumbents’ approach to deploying the technology at large scale was to build ever larger and larger industrial plants on site. What we decided to do is to build modular technology that we then scale by just creating more containers that we deploy next to each other, similar to the software space.

Q You spent five years at Tesla in Silicon Valley, before moving back to Belgium in 2022 to start Sirona. What was the most valuable lesson you learned during your time at Tesla that has helped to shape your approach to creating your own company?

A The first one is that you can go much faster and do much more with a lean team of exceptional people, compared to always larger and larger teams. We were a team of eight, and we realised that at other companies, there was a team of 40 doing the same thing. And it just was really surprising. How are we able to do the same thing with five times less people? But actually, sometimes you can ship more by being fewer people.

We’ve taken that approach with Sirona. The second aspect is that in technology, what matters most is speed of iteration, how quickly you’re able to update your technology, deploy it, learn from it, and then run that cycle again.

Q LocalGlobe backed Sirona with a seed investment in April of 2024. Through that, you’ve not only become part of the Phoenix Court portfolio, but also part of a wider community of founders looking to tackle large scale problems through innovative solutions. How has that partnership with LocalGlobe and the kinship with other founders helped you in your mission?

A LocalGlobe pushes you to continuously aim higher. So they grow your ambitions. Having someone external being able to always make you think, how do I improve the quality of this by 10x or how do I just raise my bar by 10x is very valuable. LocalGlobe and Phoenix Court are also invested in their local community. And that’s not always something that you think about as a hardware startup. However, given our significant manufacturing footprint that we’ll have in Brussels and the blue-collar workers we’ll have to hire, it is very interesting to think about these things; and how to engage with your local communities to make sure that you create a constructive environment providing value to them, and they provide value to you. That’s just another way of how LocalGlobe helps us raise the bar.

Q You spent time in Palo Alto. Phoenix Court has a vision of creating a new alternative in Europe that it calls New Palo Alto. What’s your take on that?

A They’re completely right. If you go to the Bay Area, the first thing you realise is everything is quite far away like I used to live in San Francisco, but worked in Palo Alto. My commute was an hour and 15 minutes. It takes me an hour and 15 minutes to go from Brussels to Paris. Similarly, I go from Brussels to London in two hours by train. So I definitely get the idea that actually we’re just a big agglomeration of cities, similar to Silicon Valley. You realise that the only thing that we’re missing is sort of that spark of ambition and craziness to go and build something huge. And it turns out that’s pretty easy to bring back with you in your luggage, and so that’s what I did. I got infected by that crazy, ambitious virus and brought it back to Europe to be able to leverage the huge engineering potential that we have here.

Q You’re deploying your technology in Kenya and there are plans to roll it out in the Middle East. Why have you chosen those locations?

A The superpower of Direct Air Capture is that you can deploy it anywhere in the world, because the CO2 in the air is the same everywhere. The concentrations are the same in the UK, in Kenya, in the Middle East, or in Norway. And so that allows us to really go to places where it makes the most economic sense, where it’s going to be the cheapest over the long run. For that, we need two things.

One, we need an abundance of renewable energy, because our machines are very energy hungry, and, two, it needs to be clean energy for us to be able to capture more CO2 than we emit in the process. So we got to go to places where there’s energy, and where we have places where we can store the CO2 on site.

Our project in Norway has those in spades. Norway's grid is 98% renewable with super cheap hydro on the grid, and they have Europe's first large-scale CO2 storage site in the North Sea.

Q The UN sustainability development goals are to limit temperature rises to well below two degrees Celsius by 2030 which will be achieved by reducing emissions by 45% over that same period before eventually reaching net zero in 2050. In that context, what is the role for Direct Air Capture in the coming years?

A I’m very happy that most of the world is focused on reducing emissions, but I think it’s going to be tough. Things are taking longer than we expected or hoped. We need to continue to push, to go as low as we can, but there’s a real chance that we will need to do way more Direct Air Capture than we currently say we will, because the reduction efforts are just not going to go as fast as we thought.

Q What is the business model for this?

A The business model is that we will need to pay garbage men, using taxes to clean the air, similar to how we have garbage men to clean the streets. We’ll need to do something similar with the atmosphere.