Willy Johansen
Executive Chair & Founder
Forty years in China and Europe in energy and process engineering. Led AMI's project management of Beijing Water Supply No. 10. Sits on China's national biogas standardisation committee.
China has made industrial treatment of agricultural waste the law. AMI Biogas builds the plants that do it.
A Norwegian company with thirty years of continuous presence in China, developing a first programme of ten industrial plants in Shandong Province — with feedstock already secured for many times that.
Since 1993continuous presence in China
10 plantsfirst programme, Shandong
24M tonnesfeedstock secured — ~75 plants' worth
Market
The opportunity
From 1 October 2026, Chinese farms are legally liable for the waste they leave untreated. The infrastructure to treat it at the scale required does not yet exist.
Around 3.8 billion tonnes of livestock and poultry manure are produced in China each year, and fewer than half of the pig manure is properly utilised. Left in open storage it breaks down and releases methane — a greenhouse gas roughly 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide over the twenty years after it escapes.
On 1 October 2026 liability for untreated agricultural waste moved to the farm, with penalties escalating from May 2027. That turns an environmental preference into a procurement decision with a deadline — a compliance market, not a climate story. What does not exist, at anything close to the scale required, is the infrastructure to do the treating. That is the gap AMI is built to fill.
Manure travels badly. Feedstock is a logistics asset rather than a reserves asset, which is why county-level agreements and contracted collection are worth more than technology alone.
- 3.8 bn t
- livestock and poultry manure produced in China each year
- < 50%
- of pig manure properly utilised today
- ≈ 80×
- warming effect of methane versus CO2, over a 20-year horizon
- 1 Oct 2026
- liability for untreated agricultural waste moves to the farm; penalties escalate from May 2027
Source: peer-reviewed estimates
Source: Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering review, 2020
Source: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report
Source: AMI Biogas
How the market was created
The 14th Five-Year Plan for renewable energy delivers around 1,000 large-scale biogas projects producing pipeline-quality gas.
China's first national methane policy, the Methane Emission Control Action Plan, covers energy, agriculture and waste together.
The 15th Five-Year Plan names biomethane for expansion by the NDRC and the NEA, with non-fossil power to reach 50% by 2030.
Liability for untreated agricultural waste moves to the farm. Penalties escalate from May 2027.
The IEA expects China's biogas and biomethane output to grow by 23% between 2025 and 2030, against a biomethane target of 13 billion cubic metres by 2030. Five provinces, Shandong among them, hold over 40% of the country's manure. Sources: IEA Renewables 2025; World Biogas Association; FASE review, 2020.
Policy alignment
AMI sits inside China's priorities for 2026–2030
| Plan priority | What an AMI plant does |
|---|---|
| Biomethane industrialisation | Agricultural waste to anaerobic digestion to biomethane, injected into the gas network |
| Agricultural and rural organic waste utilisation | 24 million tonnes of manure and crop residue treated under county frame agreements |
| Circular agriculture | Digestate returned as bio-fertiliser, putting nutrients back into depleted soil |
| Rural environmental improvement | Waste removed from open storage and open burning; rural air quality improved |
| Carbon reduction | Methane abatement at source, and fossil natural gas displaced |
Bilateral framework
The Norway–China Memorandum of Understanding
On 10 September 2024 the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment and China's National Development and Reform Commission signed a Memorandum of Understanding on green and low-carbon development. It runs for five years and renews automatically, and covers climate change under the Paris Agreement, green development, the circular economy, and environmental protection including waste. It creates no funding commitment; its value to AMI is framework and standing at the county and provincial level, where decisions on land, permits and feedstock are actually made.
The first plant is a reference project for national policy as much as a commercial asset — which is a material part of why permitting, land and feedstock have moved as quickly as they have.
Structure
How the model works
AMI designs, builds and operates the plants, and co-invests in every one. Ownership is separated from operation: each plant is its own asset company, funded at project level by its own investor, with AMI investing alongside on the same terms.
Ten plants, ten asset companies. Each carries its own capital and returns its own cash flow, and AMI earns in three places: on building the plants, on servicing them for their life, and as a co-investor in each. Because AMI invests alongside its investors, its interests are theirs. AMI pays farms for feedstock rather than charging a gate fee, which is what secures ten-year exclusivity. One repeatable design, one construction partner across the programme, and commissioning and training run from Hanau make each plant a repeat rather than a new project. Beyond Shandong, India and Europe are options rather than the plan.
Approach
How we work — and why it is the reason AMI is where it is
The technology explains what a plant does. It does not explain why a Norwegian company of our size holds this position in Shandong. That is explained by how we work, and we consider it the single largest reason AMI has got here.
We bring an egalitarian Nordic industrial tradition: flat hierarchy, decisions taken by consensus, responsibility carried personally, trust extended early, and relationships measured in decades rather than transactions. In China this is recognised as brotherhood. Our partners are partners rather than counterparties, and we work on their terms rather than importing ours. Chinese organisations do not do business at this scale with those they do not trust and are not at that level with. AMI is there. Very few Western companies are.
01
It reduces risk
Land, permits, feedstock, offtake and construction were secured through established relationships rather than negotiated cold. More importantly, counterparties behave as partners when conditions change — which is the point at which infrastructure projects ordinarily fail.
Fewer things go wrong, and what does go wrong gets fixed.
02
It enables growth
The same standing that delivered the first plant is what carries the rest. Access at county, provincial and national level is a platform, not a one-off. It is the reason a portfolio is realistic rather than aspirational.
Scale becomes a question of execution, not of renewed access.
03
It creates implementation force
The capacity to align many parties behind one plan, decide quickly, adapt when circumstances shift, and make sure what is agreed is actually carried out. Research on major projects is consistent: outcomes are determined by implementation capability, not by plan quality.
Agreements become operating plants.
What thirty years has opened
- Feedstock
- 24 million tonnes of agricultural residue and manure secured under ten-year frame agreements across two Shandong counties — enough to supply around 75 plants.
- Construction
- A strategic partnership with the world's largest construction company, which approached AMI and selected it as its exclusive biogas partner.
- Standard-setting
- Our founder, Willy Johansen, sits on China's national biogas standardisation committee.
- Track record
- AMI held project management on Beijing Water Supply No. 10, a $200 million national infrastructure project delivered with Mitsubishi and Anglian Water.
- Government
- Cooperation agreements signed with the Yuncheng and Juye county governments; key provincial project status awarded.
None of this was bought. It was earned over thirty years of continuous presence, and it is not quickly replicated by a sponsor arriving with capital and a technology package.
Portfolio
Pipeline
Ten plants in the first programme, all in Shandong. Feedstock secured for many times that.
Plant 1Yuncheng — moving toward construction
Plants 2–10Yuncheng & Juye — county agreements signed
complete
in progress
ahead
Stages, left to right: cooperation agreement · feedstock secured · site & permits · offtake · construction · operating.
- The programme
- Ten industrial plants across Yuncheng and Juye counties. The first, in Yuncheng, is moving toward construction.
- The feedstock
- 24 million tonnes of agricultural residue and manure under ten-year frame agreements — enough for around 75 plants. All of it annually regenerating: manure, rice straw, corn straw, mixed crop residue.
- India
- A joint-venture agreement is in place. The same national policy logic applies.
- Europe
- New-build and retrofit, worked from the German engineering base in Hanau.
Track record
AS Miljøindustri is founded in Norway and becomes one of the country's leading environmental engineers, supplying biogas plants to Oslo, Stavanger and Trondheim.
AMI enters China and becomes Roediger's representative for the Nordic countries. Founder Willy Johansen goes on to lead project management on Beijing Water Supply No. 10 — a $200 million project delivered with Mitsubishi and Anglian Water.
The first Norwegian hanging-lances installation, at VEAS outside Oslo, comes on line. It is still running.
AMI's principals deliver water, sludge and waste-to-energy projects across China, Turkey and Morocco.
Three biogas plants contracted in Xingren, Guizhou Province.
AMI Biogas is established as a pure-play industrial biogas company, and the Centre of Excellence opens in Hanau, Germany.
Norway and China sign a Memorandum of Understanding on green and low-carbon development.
Cooperation agreements with the Yuncheng and Juye county governments in Shandong Province secure 24 million tonnes of feedstock on ten-year terms.
The world's largest construction company selects AMI as its exclusive biogas partner, and Shandong grants key provincial project status.
Technology
The Hanging Lances system
German engineering, deployed by a Norwegian company: no moving parts in the digester, no dilution water, and a more concentrated digestate.
The hanging lances mixing system was developed in Germany by Roediger, a long-established name in municipal wastewater treatment. Our Chief Technology Officer, Michael Holzmann, is the fourth generation of that family and Managing Director of Protechnic Engineering; he has built more than 250 biogas plants and is the technical architect of AMI's hanging-lance platform. AS Miljøindustri became Roediger's representative in the Nordic countries in 1993, and AMI has deployed and scaled the system since. The first installation, at VEAS outside Oslo, has run since 1997.
Where the technology stands
Proven
Thirty years on sewage sludge
The mixing system has run continuously on municipal sewage sludge for thirty years, at scale, in plants that cannot be taken out of service.
Not a prototype.
New
Applied to agricultural waste
The same system on pig manure and other agricultural waste at twelve per cent dry solids. Figures for this application are design values, and the yield is tested at commissioning.
We state the step plainly.
Protection
Know-how and feedstock
Operating know-how, ten-year county frame agreements and contracted feedstock. The patents have expired, and we say so openly.
A copier still has to find the material.
What is not commonplace is the engineering judgement to specify, build and run it well — which sits with the Hanau team, and with Michael Holzmann personally.
The mechanical principle
Conventional digester
Wide and shallow — typically 35 m across, 8 m high. Agitators inside the tank keep the substrate moving; they wear, and servicing them means stopping the digester. Sediment builds up, so the volume producing gas shrinks year by year. Mixing energy limits solids loading, so feedstock must be diluted.
AMI hanging lances
Tall and narrow — 35 m high, 25 m across. Lances suspended from the roof inject the plant's own biogas back in; like blowing through a straw in a glass, the rising bubbles mix the whole volume. No moving parts inside the tank, and mixing runs for two to three hours a day rather than continuously. Mixing is distributed rather than applied at a point — roughly twice the solids loading.
Inside the digester
Conventional plants lose concentration twice: once to the water added so the stirrers can work, and again to the organic matter converted into gas. AMI's mixing removes the first entirely. The second happens in every digester, whatever the mixing, because that is where the methane comes from. Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium do not become gas. They stay in the digestate, in a smaller volume of solids, so the fertiliser is considerably richer per tonne than the material that went in.
Reliability
The process comes from municipal wastewater treatment, where sewage arrives whether or not the plant is running and the digester cannot be taken out of service. Reliability was the design constraint, not an optimisation. A stopped digester loses its bacterial culture, and re-establishing it costs from a couple of months to a year of lost production. One German installation ran ten years before being opened for inspection, was found in order, and was closed again; it has run for decades since.
Performance
| Parameter | AMI | Conventional | Thermal hydrolysis | Basis on which we state it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixing | gas lances, 2–3 h a day | mechanical, continuous | mechanical, after steam treatment | Design characteristic of the mixing system |
| Dilution water added | none | yes, substantial | process water and condensate | Design: no water is added at any point |
| Dry solids in the digester | about 12% | 5–8% | 8–12% | AMI design basis for agricultural feed; the other ranges are AMI's engineering assessment |
| Liquid to store, haul and spread | low | high | high | Follows from running without dilution water |
| Internal moving parts | none | agitators, impellers | mechanical mixers | Design characteristic of the mixing system |
| Operating hours | 8,400+ / yr (96%) | 7,000–7,500 | — | Design basis of 350 operating days; no submerged moving parts to service |
Process & outputs
Feedstock at about 12% dry solids Pre-treatment Digestion Upgrading Dewatering
Feedstocks
Livestock manure, rice straw, corn straw and mixed crop residues — agricultural waste that is currently a disposal problem, burned in the field or held in open lagoons. None of it is forest biomass, and none competes with food production.
Outputs
Three outputs from the same tonne. Biomethane, upgraded to natural-gas quality and injected into the network, displacing fossil gas directly. Bio-fertiliser: digestate dewatered to a solid cake and returned to agricultural land in place of mineral inputs, with the liquor recirculated so that no fresh water is added. And carbon reductions, from the methane that would otherwise escape.
Verification
- On request
- Reference plant operating data on comparable feed, the plant design basis, mass and energy balance, process and P&I diagrams, and equipment specifications.
- At commissioning
- Yield performance test; per-plant CO2-equivalent abatement quantification, with the methodology stated.
Where a figure here is a design value rather than a measured result, we say so, and the underlying data is available for review. Michael Holzmann, our Chief Technology Officer, is available to take technical questions directly.
References
Reference installations
Where the hanging lances system is already running.
Delivery in China and beyond
- Beijing Water Supply No. 10AMI as project manager · $200 million
- Shanghai sludge plantProcess delivery
- Centre of Excellence, HanauIn operation since 2023
Forty years of environmental engineering and project delivery in 25 countries: more than $2 billion of infrastructure delivered by AMI's principals, and more than 250 biogas plants built by our Chief Technology Officer. Site visits to operating installations can be arranged.
Climate
Climate and impact
Carbon is the third revenue line, from the same tonne of waste as the other two. The impact goes further than the carbon.
Untreated agricultural waste decomposes in open storage and releases methane — roughly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the first twenty years, about 28 times over a hundred. Capturing and converting it is the plant's core function, not a co-benefit, so climate effect and revenue move together rather than trading against each other.
The additionality is structural. The waste in these counties would break down in the open if the plant were not there. Treatment happens only because AMI builds and runs it.
- Basis
- methane avoided by treating mandated feedstock, plus fossil gas displaced
- Measurement
- tonnes of CO2-equivalent abated, per plant, per quarter
- Methodology
- in preparation, with independent verification
- Approach
- treated as upside and not relied on in the base case — never a gross theoretical figure
Impact beyond the energy
- Methane abated
- Manure that would emit methane in open storage is captured and used as fuel. Carbon credits are pursued on the abatement.
- Energy security
- Pipeline biomethane substitutes imported natural gas, delivered into the existing gas network.
- Soil and nutrients
- Digestate is dewatered to a fertiliser cake that returns nitrogen, phosphorus and organic matter to farmland.
- Water
- No fresh water is added anywhere in the process; liquor from dewatering is recirculated to the front end.
- Rural wealth
- AMI pays farms for their waste rather than charging a gate fee, and each plant employs about 16 operating staff, recruited locally.
- Compliance for farms
- Farms meet their new legal obligation on waste without having to build treatment themselves.
Contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals 2 (zero hunger), 6 (clean water), 7 (clean energy), 12 (responsible consumption), 13 (climate action) and 17 (partnerships).
Per-plant CO2-equivalent abatement quantification is in preparation and will be provided with the methodology stated. It is not published here.
Team
Engineering and delivery, across Norway, Germany and China
Four hundred years of combined corporate and international project experience. Industrial operators, not financiers who found a technology.
Lars Johansen
CEO & Co-Founder
Leads AMI's county-government relationships in Yuncheng and Juye. Former Director of Special Projects at Sinopec Gateway; director of the Sino-German-Nordic Technology Centre.
Michael Holzmann
Chief Technology Officer
Fourth generation of the Roediger family and Managing Director of Protechnic Engineering. Has built more than 250 biogas plants and is the technical architect of AMI's hanging-lance platform. Runs engineering from Hanau.
Christian Espolin Johnson
Chief Operating Officer
Runs operational systems, finance processes and procurement. Former Group Communications Director at Jotun, Managing Director of Jotun Iberica, Country Manager for Nestlé/CPW Norway; Orkla.
Knut Bårdsen
Chief Strategy Officer
Thirty-five years in energy and M&A. Background at Siemens and KPMG; founder of the advisory firm Nordic Change. MSc engineering, NTNU; Fulbright MBA.
Helge Tryti
Chief Business Officer
Leads investor relations and business development in Asia. Former Commercial Counsellor at the Royal Norwegian Embassy in India and Country Director, India, at Innovation Norway. Background at IBM and KPMG.
Centre of Excellence · Hanau, Germany
Dr Markus Roediger
Anaerobic Digestion Authority
Internationally recognised authority on anaerobic digestion and process optimisation. AMI has represented Roediger in the Nordic countries since 1993.
Dr J. Glasenapp
Technology Expert
German-trained process engineer carrying the Roediger engineering practice into AMI plants.
Ulrich Kreutz
Process Engineering Expert
Plant commissioning and operator training for every AMI plant.
- Remote oversight
- Real-time data from every plant flows into Hanau, so a problem is caught and answered before it reaches cash flow.
- Yield optimisation
- Each plant's parameters are benchmarked and tuned continuously against the best-performing plant in the portfolio.
- AMI Academy
- Uniform training and certification for operators. About 16 operating staff per plant, recruited locally.
China organisation
Wang Jun (Thomas)
Country Manager, China
Runs AMI's in-country commercial work. An engineer with senior roles across trade and investment in China and responsibility for more than $2 billion of infrastructure projects.
Dr Gao Genshu
Project Manager
German-trained engineer, former Chief Researcher for large-scale solid-waste systems. The technical and regulatory interface in China; has worked on more than $2 billion of projects.
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Contact
Let's talk
We are glad to hear from investors, lenders, partners and suppliers.
The fastest way to a first meeting is a short email — who you are, and what you would like to cover. It reaches the CEO directly.
Michael Holzmann, our Chief Technology Officer, is available to take technical questions directly. Site visits to operating installations can be arranged.
AMI Biogas International AS — registered in Norway. Operations in Shandong Province, China. Engineering in Hanau, Germany.
Email lars.johansen@amibiogas.com
Opens your email client with the subject line already filled in.