Interview With Flux Carbon Founder Sam Davies

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Last Updated on: 14th February 2025, 11:54 am

Q: What was your journey that lead you to become the founder of Flux Carbon?

Sam Davies: I have this vision of my grandchildren sitting on my knee and asking ‘What did you do during the great climate crisis, Grandad?#8217; and want to be able to look them in the eye and at least let them know I tried! I started my career in the British Army, serving 6 years as an officer in a reconnaissance regiment. 

When I left the military, I was looking for the best way to use my skills to have a positive impact on the planet, and a startup made perfect sense for someone who enjoys problem solving, leadership, and fast-paced environments. I first really discovered CDR through working on the production of the film Legion 44 (by Leila Connors, Paulina Villalonga, and Fabian Nilsson) in Kenya, and was inspired by the journey of the other entrepreneurs in this space and thought ‘if they can do it, why can’t I?#8217; That was really the birth of Flux Carbon. And a special shout out to Dirk Paessler and his Carbon Drawdown Initiative for getting us off the ground with a small grant for rock exploration and an early investment into Flux — this support was crucial.

Q: What does Flux Carbon offer, and what makes it stand out?

Flux is Africa’s Enhanced Rock Weathering company — we are unlocking the vast potential of ERW across the continent, in order to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a meaningful scale, and improve the lives of millions of farmers.

Flux offers CDR buyers the chance to not only remove CO2 at large scale, but also improve the lives of farmers and communities in Africa — reporting these benefits alongside their net-zero achievements.

Flux stands out because whilst most experts would agree that sub-saharan Africa is a naturally brilliant place to conduct ERW, the difficult operating environment requires local knowledge, skills and persistence to unlock this potential. 

We believe that our ERW credits will have the most co-benefits of any CDR pathway worldwide and this is based on 3 things: 1) lack of access to fertilizers (prices have 4x since 2020), 2) depleted baseline health of soils from high rainfall and natural weathering, and 3) low socio-economic development and high unemployment.

Q: What was it that first made you interested in carbon removal, and when?

Being involved in filming Legion 44 really opened my eyes to carbon removal and I can remember the excitement at first learning about the different pathways, and spending long nights reading scientific papers on geological storage, DAC, and ERW. What really grabbed me was the focus on permanence in the sector — I am a massive fan of protecting and replanting our natural forests, but struggle with the use of these as carbon projects that can be used as offsets — if there is no long term guarantee of CO2 sequestration.

Q: Where do you hope, and where do you think, the carbon removal industry is in 3 years?

In 3 years, I think the most important thing for the carbon removal industry is that the methodologies, protocols, and pathways both for the VCM, but also the compliance markets (6.2 & 6.4), are locked down and approved. This will really set the conditions for a rapid scaling of the CDRs between 2028 and 2030. I think we will get there — lots of great work is being done right now and there is growing consensus on issues that just 2 years go divided opinion.

Individual companies will make progress towards lowering cost curves and improving efficiencies during this time as well, but I think the next 3 years is about laying really good foundations for this industry to rocket as demand and increases.

Q: What are the main unsolved questions in ERW, in your opinion?

One of the main unsolved questions around ERW is “How well can models simulate weathering and losses?#8221; This is a crucial question as it remains one of the most promising pathways to reducing the cost of generating rigorous ERW credits, which today relies entirely on empirical measurements. The best way to solve this question is with large, high quality and high density data sets, something that Flux and others are working hard on.

Q: If you were not dedicating so much resources to carbon removal, where else would you dedicate them?

I think I would be looking at methane avoidance — I’m quite terrified by reports of the amount of methane being released around the world, and the potency that it has on global warming compared with CO2 (I’ve read between 20x and 70x more harmful depending on its state?). I think there is a lot of fantastic work and innovation to be done in this space and there are relatively few companies looking at it.

Q: What trends are you most excited about? Where are the biggest holes in the carbon removal industry?

I’m liking the growing trend of people switching careers into climate and carbon removal. As a young industry, there is a very limited pool of individuals with years and years of experience — what we need instead is talented, motivated, and ambitious individuals from other high performance sectors to feel like they can make the switch to a job that pays well and helps save the planet too — that’s a good trend! 

Probably one of the biggest holes in carbon removal is policy, which is just a slow moving beast compared to startups, but there are great organizations working on this too and some promising progress.

Q: What are overlooked opportunities in cleantech, carbon, or specifically carbon removal, in your opinion?

As mentioned above, methane avoidance seems like a good opportunity, perhaps leveraging new tech such as AI or remote sensing (I’ve seen some of this before), but also we would need ways to finance the reductions and rigorous methodologies for projects that then act on the methane emissions. 

In carbon removal, I think Kenya and Africa in general is still overlooked — there is absolutely immense potential here for DAC (using renewables) Biochar (using waste biomass) and ERW (with great feedstocks and perfect weathering conditions) — hence why we recently helped set up Carbon Removal Kenya to spread the word!

Q: And lastly, if you could enact one policy for climate, what would it be?

$10 per tonne carbon tax for all businesses, rising $10 per year until 2035, to be spent on carbon removal purchases!