Eirik Fadnes

Eirik Fadnes did not come to water the way most water-tech CEOs do. He is, by training, a finance man: an auditor at Ernst and Young, then a financial controller at the Norwegian industrial investor Aker, then chief financial officer of an oil-and-gas supplier in Singapore. Water was, in his own words, his first encounter with the industry, and it happened almost by chance, when he met the founder of Cambi and was drawn in by a company with nearly three decades of history that was, as he put it, by far the global market leader but still only scratching the surface. He joined as CFO in 2019 and became CEO in 2020.

Cambi sells one core idea, and Eirik Fadnes describes it as essentially a giant pressure cooker. Sewage sludge from a wastewater plant is heated with recycled steam and held at 160 degrees Celsius and six bar of pressure for twenty to thirty minutes, and then the pressure is dropped suddenly, which bursts the cells open. That step, called thermal hydrolysis, makes the sludge far easier for the downstream digesters to eat, so you get up to 40% more biogas out of the same material and you are left with half the volume of biosolids, the treated solids that come out the other end, which means less waste to truck away, more renewable energy out of the plant, and cleaner economics for the utility running it.

Eirik Fadnes ran a company that already dominated its niche, with around 90% market share outside China and half of all the sludge in the United Kingdom passing through Cambi's process. The numbers he is proudest of are the ones that connect sludge to carbon. In Beijing, Cambi treats the sludge of more than twenty million people and helped cut the city's emissions by 2.2 million tons of CO2 a year, of which about four hundred thousand tons are directly down to the Cambi process rather than the incineration it replaced. In Washington DC, the utility booked a 35% capital saving, around 200 million dollars, plus twenty million a year in running costs. That last contract took ten years to land, which tells you something about how patient you have to be selling new infrastructure into a conservative industry.

Eirik Fadnes is the executive who turned that dominance into a public company. He led Cambi's 2021 listing on Oslo's Euronext Growth market, raising capital to push a newer design-build-own-operate model where Cambi finances and runs the plant rather than just selling the kit, and his own scoreboard for the 2019 to 2023 stretch is the kind a finance CEO keeps: revenue compounding at 37% a year and the share price returning 266% on the Oslo exchange in 2023. He stepped down in 2024, did a spell of independent advisory and interim-CFO work, and is today the chief financial officer of Sporveien, the company that runs Oslo's trams and metro. His full Cambi story sits inside my Leviathan database of the water sector.

“Essentially, it is a giant pressure cooker. The warm sludge passes through a pressure vessel where it's mixed with steam until you get a temperature of 160 degrees at a 6 bar pressure, and it holds there for 20 to 30 minutes. And at the end of the cycle, you have a sudden pressure drop down to atmospheric pressure, which disintegrates the cells.”

Ask him for a personal lesson and he tells you about a hike in Leh, in the Indian Himalayas, where he set out for a summit an elderly couple had just managed, got hit by altitude sickness, started seeing the river run uphill, and turned back. What he took from it was that you hold the goal but stay loose on the path and listen to the people around you, which, looking at the patient, focused way he grew Cambi, is about as honest a self-description as a CEO gives.