We Are Biogas Exclusive

Field Report: World Biogas Expo 2026 — A Global Industry That Knows What It’s Doing, and Where It’s Going

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | We Are Biogas

The World Biogas Association and The Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association (ADBA)‘s World Biogas Expo in Birmingham assembles the actual global biogas industry under one roof. Not a regional delegation. Not a conference of observers. The people building this sector, from across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, showing up to compare notes and push thinking forward.

This year delivered on every level. The International Energy Agency (IEA) launched BioGRAM, a new geospatial biogas potential map, with Peter Zeniewski‘s framing landing hard: “the potential exists everywhere.” Not a polished conference line. An empirical claim. Biogas potential isn’t a geography problem. It’s an implementation problem. A visit to a CNG Fuels station put it in physical terms, watching trucks from GXO, DHL, Amazon, and Tesco refuel on biomethane at 90% lower emissions than diesel because it works and it’s cost-competitive.

One line from Simona Amerio has stayed with me: “The real catalyst behind the energy transition is not technology. It’s people.”

That’s the mission.

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Policy & Capital

One Year After OBBBA, the US Biogas Industry Is Still Waiting on the Tax Credit That Should Be Working

🇺🇸 United States | Waste Dive

One year after President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, key questions about implementation of the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Tax Credit remain unanswered, specifically for manure-derived fuels. The DOE’s updated 45ZCF-GREET model released in June moved things forward on several fronts, adding carbon capture parameters and clarifying treatment of process energy in RNG systems. But the manure emissions calculations that are make-or-break for dairy and swine RNG projects remain unresolved. The American Biogas Council called it plainly: the major updates needed are still unfinished. Until those calculations land, a credit that should be unlocking farm-level investment continues to sit out of reach for the producers who need it most.

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Ukraine Plans Four New Biomethane Plants Worth $51 Million as Export Ambitions Grow

🇺🇦 Ukraine | UBN News

Two Ukrainian agribusinesses have announced plans to develop four biomethane facilities representing a combined investment of over $51 million. Vitagro Energy intends to build three plants across the Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, and Rivne regions of western Ukraine, with a fourth planned by a second agribusiness group. The projects are a direct expression of Ukraine’s growing biomethane export ambitions, following parliamentary legislation enabling gas sales to Europe and the first commercial exports now flowing to Germany. The country’s 11.6 BCM annual feedstock potential from waste and residues alone makes it the European leader in what’s available. Four new plants is how that potential starts becoming infrastructure.

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DOE Awards $6.9 Million to Nine Waste-to-Energy Projects Targeting Transportation Fuel Production

🇺🇸 United States | Department of Energy

The US Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office and Vehicle Technologies Office have announced $6.9 million in funding for nine waste-to-energy projects across six states, focused on local waste management solutions that produce low-carbon transportation fuels. The projects span two categories: feasibility study development for communities earlier in their planning process, and detailed engineering design work for those closer to construction. Feedstocks include food waste, municipal wastewater sludge, solid waste, and manure. This is patient infrastructure funding, the kind that builds the evidence base and engineering readiness that commercial projects depend on. Nine communities moving from concept to analysis to design is nine communities closer to operational infrastructure.

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Project Spotlights

Nordion Energi Breaks Ground on Liquefied Biogas Facility at the Port of Gothenburg

🇸🇪 Sweden | Biomass Magazine

Construction has begun on a liquefied biogas facility at the Port of Gothenburg, owned and developed by Nordion Energi, with completion expected in early 2027. The facility is positioned to play a central role in making Swedish biogas available to the maritime and shipping sector, a demand channel that has historically been difficult to access without liquefaction infrastructure at port. Gothenburg is Scandinavia’s largest port. Building a BioLNG production facility directly at the quayside is not a niche logistics decision. It’s a statement about where Swedish biogas is heading.

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Elevion Group Acquires Italian Biogas Specialist BTS Biogas, Including Nine Biomethane Plants in Northern Italy

🇮🇹 Italy | Bioenergy Insight

Netherlands-based Elevion Group has agreed to acquire a 100% stake in BTS Holdings Italy, the parent company of BTS Biogas, a 25-year-old EPC and O&M specialist with approximately 100 employees, active across Italy, France, the UK, and wider Europe. The deal also includes 51% stakes in companies operating nine biomethane plants in northern Italy, three already producing and six in conversion from biogas to biomethane. Once fully operational, the portfolio is forecast to deliver approximately 30 million standard cubic metres of biomethane annually. This is the supply chain consolidating in real time. Experienced operators with existing permitted infrastructure being absorbed into a platform with the capital and ambition to take them further.

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Brazil Signs Its First Commercial Biomethane Injection Contract in Santa Catarina

🇧🇷 Brazil | Canal Solar

H2A Bioenergia, operating Brazil’s first ANP-certified biomethane facility using swine waste in Santa Catarina, has signed a contract for commercial biomethane injection. It’s a milestone in a market where regulatory frameworks and certification systems have been building toward this moment for years. The plant uses CSTR-type biodigesters and membrane purification to produce biomethane from pig slurry, with purity exceeding 96%, alongside food-grade CO2 as a co-product. As H2A scales toward 22 new plants and $570 million in investment, the Santa Catarina facility is the reference project that everything else builds from. First commercial injection in a market this large, backed by a mandatory blending framework that started at 1% this year with a trajectory to 10% by 2034, is the kind of signal that changes investment calculus across a sector.

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Linden, NJ’s Food Waste-to-RNG Megaproject Hits a Safety Milestone, With Full Operations Coming

🇺🇸 United States | MyCentralJersey

The Linden Renewable Energy facility in New Jersey, a $440 million food waste-to-RNG project being developed by SJI, Captona, and RNG Energy Solutions, has reached a significant safety milestone as it moves toward full commercial operations. When complete, the facility will process up to 1,475 tonnes of organic waste per day, producing 3,783 dekatherms of RNG daily for injection into Elizabethtown Gas’s distribution system. It is on track to be one of the largest food waste-to-biogas facilities in the United States, serving New York City, northern New Jersey, and the broader metro region. Safety milestones are how large AD projects get from construction to commercial operation. This one is close.

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Tech, Science & Innovation

Pig Slurry Is Now Powering AI Servers on a Farm in North-West England

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | FarmingUK

A pig farm in north-west England is using electricity generated from slurry-fed anaerobic digestion to power high-performance AI computing equipment, under a model developed by Easy Compute and its Green Compute network. Instead of exporting surplus electricity to the grid at 8 to 12p per kilowatt-hour, the farm is running commercial AI servers on site. The company claims this can generate returns up to ten times higher, with the potential to reduce the payback period on an AD plant from 12 to 15 years down to around four. The model carries caveats worth noting: independently audited farm-level performance figures haven’t been published, revenue-sharing terms aren’t disclosed, and cryptocurrency income from the Bittensor network introduces volatility. But the underlying concept, biogas electricity as a premium on-site energy product rather than a grid export, is one the sector should be paying close attention to. CEO Josh Riddett put it memorably: “The best clean AI on the market is quite literally running on pig muck.”

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Anaergia to Supply AD Technology for Australia’s Goodness Grown Facility, Its First Major Australian Reference Project

🇦🇺 Australia | Bioenergy Insight

Anaergia, through its Australian subsidiary, has signed a contract with RF Corval Pty Ltd to deliver proprietary anaerobic digestion technology and equipment for an advanced AD facility at the Goodness Grown farm production site in Tongala, Victoria. The project marks Anaergia’s first major reference project in the Australian market. Australia’s AD sector has significant untapped potential relative to its agricultural feedstock base, and a project of this profile, with a globally recognised technology provider establishing its first major local installation, is the kind of reference point that opens conversations with other developers and financiers in the market. First projects in new geographies matter disproportionately.

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Expansion & Trends

Biomethane in Costa Rica: A CABEI-EU Roadmap for Decarbonizing the Country’s Most Polluting Sector

🇨🇷 Costa Rica | Noticias Ambientales

A study supported by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration and the European Union has identified Costa Rica as having strong potential to adopt biomethane for heavy transport decarbonization, the sector responsible for 37.6% of the country’s polluting emissions. The country has abundant agro-industrial and livestock organic waste streams, strategic logistics corridors suited to refueling infrastructure, and a national planning horizon extending to 2040 that creates a framework for long-term private investment. A CABEI-EU Technological Roadmap 2025 to 2040 prioritizes infrastructure, regulation, and investment to validate biomethane in the transport sector. Central America entering this conversation adds another geography to an already rapidly expanding global picture.

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Landfill Gas Now Drives 64% of US RNG Production and 700 More Sites Are Waiting

🇺🇸 United States | American Biogas Council

New data from the American Biogas Council shows that landfill gas now accounts for 64% of all US renewable natural gas production, with 598 landfill gas capture systems providing roughly three-quarters of all biogas captured nationally. Twenty new landfill gas projects came online in 2025, adding 39.9 billion cubic feet of new biogas capture capacity, about 75% of all new US biogas capture capacity added across every sector last year. Total estimated investment in landfill gas facilities has now reached nearly $14.9 billion. And here’s the number that should be driving strategic conversations: approximately 705 additional landfills remain suitable for development, representing up to 455 billion cubic feet of additional biogas annually. The sector’s largest single feedstock category is not tapped out. It’s barely halfway there.

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North American RNG Passes 600 Operational Facilities as the RNG Coalition Turns 15

🇺🇸 North America | Bioenergy Insight

The RNG Coalition is marking 15 years of operation alongside a milestone in the sector it represents: more than 600 operational RNG facilities now running across North America. The North American RNG portfolio has reached 604 operational facilities following a rapid period of buildout. From a standing start to a 600-facility continent-wide infrastructure network in 15 years is the kind of compounding that tends to accelerate rather than slow down. The pipeline keeps growing. The sector the Coalition was founded to represent looks nothing like what it looked like in 2011, and that’s the point.

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A Global Industry That Knows What It’s Doing, and Where It’s Going

There are events you attend because you should. And there are events you attend because they genuinely recharge something. The World Biogas Expo in Birmingham is firmly in the second category for me.

Every year, this show does something that very few events in this space can claim: it assembles the actual global biogas industry under one roof. Not a regional slice of it. Not a delegation of observers. The people building this sector, developers, researchers, policymakers, engineers, advocates, from across Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, showing up in Birmingham to compare notes, push thinking forward, and, if you’re lucky, have exactly the kind of corridor conversation that reorients how you see the whole space.

The Map That Changes the Conversation

The session I keep returning to is Peter Zeniewski‘s presentation from the International Energy Agency (IEA), during which the launch of the newly expanded geospatial biogas potential map BioGRAM was announced. A data tool built from spatial crop output datasets, livestock assessments, waste generation data, key regional plant data, and on-the-ground studies that the IEA continues to improve. The map generates supply curves from gate fee estimates for crop residues, labor, and materials, and it’s designed from the outset to be a living resource. The IEA actively wants people to use it, stress-test it, and contribute to making it more accurate over time.

What strikes me about this isn’t the map itself, impressive as it is. It’s the framing Peter put around it. When he said “the potential exists everywhere,” he wasn’t offering a polished conference line. He was making an empirical claim backed by the data the IEA had just built. Biogas potential isn’t a geography problem. It’s an implementation problem. That distinction matters enormously for how the industry makes its case to the policy and finance communities.

The IEA releasing this tool publicly, and actively inviting collaboration on its improvement, is a signal worth noting. It reflects a maturation in how the sector is being understood at the institutional level, not as a niche technology with localized applications, but as a global infrastructure class with a measurable resource base. That’s a different conversation.

The Scale of What’s Possible, and the Work Required

Charlotte Morton OBE‘s remarks set the macro frame for the event, and she didn’t undersell it. Biogas has the potential to supply roughly a third of the world’s gas demand if properly tapped, and to generate between 10 and 15 million jobs worldwide in the process. Mexico and Argentina are now active parts of the WBA’s global expansion, two major agricultural economies in Latin America whose feedstock base alone represents an enormous untapped resource.

These are not aspirational figures designed to fill a keynote slide. They’re the outputs of serious resource modeling, and they sit in stark contrast to current deployment levels. That gap, between what the data says is possible and what the world has actually built, is both the challenge and the opportunity the sector is collectively working to close.

Patrick Serfass of the American Biogas Council brought a complementary dimension to this, focused on cross-border market development and the potential for the US to participate in a genuinely international biomethane trade. The domestic market in America is sophisticated and growing, but the more interesting strategic question is whether, and how, that expertise and production capacity can interface with demand in markets that are further along on the policy side. It’s an early conversation, but it’s the right one to be having.

France: A Case Study in Scaling, and What Comes After

Cecile FRÉDÉRICQ‘s panel segment on France’s biomethane trajectory was one of the most instructive of the expo for me, because France represents a market that has done the hard work of scaling and is now dealing with the second-order challenges that come with maturity.

France passed 2.2 bcm of biomethane injected into the gas grid, already past the 1.5 bcm threshold that was the original benchmark. The majority of that production has come from farmer-led projects, which is structurally significant, because it means French biomethane has developed as an agricultural income stream as much as an energy asset. The right to inject into the grid, enshrined in legislation since 2018 on the condition of meeting environmental standards, gave the sector a stable foundation to build on.

But the scheme is now changing, and not in a direction that’s straightforward for existing and future producers. From 2026, the French government is shifting from a consumption-based perspective to a tendering mechanism, eliminating feed-in tariffs in favour of competitive allocation. The concern, as Cécile framed it, is specifically for farmers: smaller agricultural operators who built their project economics around a guaranteed price are now being asked to compete in a system designed with larger, more financially sophisticated developers in mind. The change only applies to future plants, which limits the immediate damage, but it signals a recalibration of who the French biomethane market is designed to serve as it moves from deployment phase to competitive maturity.

It’s a dynamic that other markets should watch closely. Scaling biomethane on farmer participation is a feature, not a bug. It’s what gives the sector its distributed, rural character. Policy design that inadvertently prices out the agricultural base in the name of market efficiency is a real risk.

Biogas at the Pump: A Visit to CNG Fuels

One of the things I love most about the World Biogas Expo is that Birmingham puts you in the middle of the infrastructure. Biogas isn’t abstract here. It’s running through pipelines, compressors, and tank trucks, powering the HGVs you see pulling into freight hubs on the M6. So when the opportunity came up to visit one of CNG Fuels‘ refuelling stations during the event, I took it immediately.

Seeing it in operation is something else. CNG Fuels, part of ReFuels N.V, Europe’s largest supplier of renewable biomethane to the transport sector, operates the UK’s largest public-access Bio-CNG refuelling network, with 16 stations across major trucking routes and mobile units ensuring continuous availability. Their Bio-CNG delivers emissions savings of greater than 90% compared to diesel on a well-to-wheel basis, and the fuel is independently verified under the UK Department for Transport’s Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation. The customer list reads like a who’s who of UK logistics: GXO Logistics, Inc., DHL, Amazon, Lidl in Germany, Royal Mail, Tesco, Waitrose & Partners, Marks and Spencer, ALDI Stores Australia. These are commercial fleet decisions made at scale by companies with serious decarbonisation targets and even more serious cost pressures.

Standing at one of those stations, watching trucks refuel with biomethane produced from food waste and agricultural by-products, is a useful corrective to the abstraction that can creep into conference discussions. This is what deployment looks like. This is the end-use case for everything being discussed inside the Expo halls: the AD plants, the upgrading technology, the grid injection, the supply chains. It all points here. A truck, a pump, 90% fewer emissions than the diesel it replaced, and a fleet operator who chose it because it works and it’s cost-competitive.

CNG Fuels is currently targeting the capacity to refuel up to 20,000 trucks daily by end-2028, with a long-term ambition of powering 10% of the UK’s articulated truck fleet with 100% renewable biomethane by 2030, a reduction of over 1.2 million tonnes of GHG emissions annually at that scale. Seeing the infrastructure in person makes that target feel less aspirational and more like a construction plan.

Recognition That Lands

The AD & Biogas Industry Awards gala dinner is one of those events that reminds you why industry recognition matters, not as ceremony for its own sake, but because the people and projects that get spotlighted at these events are doing work that genuinely deserves a wider audience.

A few that stood out this year:

Lazarous Chewe, AD Hero of the Year — Retist Solutions Limited, Zambia. Lazarous is leading the technical team developing waste-to-energy solutions across Africa, with a particular innovation that deserves more attention: bottled biogas compressed at 40 bar in specially designed cylinders. This is not a minor technical footnote. It’s a distribution model that makes biogas accessible in contexts where grid injection is simply not the relevant infrastructure, and it’s the kind of pragmatic, context-appropriate engineering that the sector needs far more of in off-grid and developing market settings.

David Hurren, AD Biogas Support of the Year — DAH Renewable Consulting, UK. A personal highlight of the evening. David is someone I’m proud to call a friend, and watching him take this recognition was a genuinely great moment. DAH Renewable Consulting has built a reputation for the kind of hands-on, technically rigorous support that moves projects forward. This award was thoroughly deserved and long overdue.

FSM Education Programme, Education Campaign of the Year — Sguazzi in partnership with Anaergia, Italy. This one resonated with me for obvious reasons. The FSM Education Programme is exactly the kind of initiative We Are Biogas exists to amplify: knowledge-building that brings people into the biogas conversation who might otherwise never find their way in. Anaergia’s work here reflects a recognition that technical expertise alone doesn’t build an industry. You also need the educational infrastructure to develop the next generation of people who understand it, advocate for it, and build it.

Biogas International Limited, Net Zero Circular Solution of the Year — Kenya. The Trash 2 Resource model uses BIL’s proprietary FlexiTech T-Rex modular AD technology to convert organic waste at source in urban markets and high-density settlements into clean cooking energy and bio-fertiliser, while simultaneously recovering, repurposing, and recycling inorganic materials. No waste transport emissions. No charcoal displacement lag. A genuinely closed loop, operating at the community scale.

Govardhannathji Energies LLP, WBA Biogas Plant of the Year — Gujarat, India. Gujarat’s largest integrated biogas plant, producing both renewable energy and high-value organic fertiliser under the UTPANN brand, with digital integration, large-scale nutrient recycling, and an explicit focus on farmer empowerment and rural uplift. India’s CBG sector has been developing at pace, and this plant represents what the benchmark looks like at scale.

Naiara Ortiz de Mendíbil Romo, Women in Biogas — Sedigas, Spain. A well-deserved recognition for someone working at the intersection of gas industry policy and biomethane development in one of Europe’s more complex regulatory environments.

The full winners list is worth reading in its entirety. The geographic breadth alone, Zambia, Kenya, India, Romania, Brazil, Spain, the US, the UK, is its own statement about where this industry is actually operating.

What I’m Taking Into the Rest of the Year

Conferences like this one do something specific that newsletters and podcasts can’t quite replicate: they let you feel the momentum of a sector in real time. Not through data, but through the density of serious people in the same room, pushing on the same problems from different angles, with different country contexts and different timescales. That’s hard to manufacture and impossible to fake.

The conversations I had at the Expo this year, reconnecting with people I’ve been following and talking with across this whole journey with We Are Biogas, and meeting new ones, left me more focused, not less. More convinced that the story of this sector is one worth covering with rigour and ambition. More aware of the gaps between what the industry knows how to do and what the world’s policy and finance architecture has yet to catch up with.

I’m taking that back into the platform: more momentum, more focus on the people moving this space forward, more of the granular, cross-border storytelling that helps the sector see itself clearly.

Simona Amerio, shortlisted for Women in Biogas this year at the awards, put something into words during her session at the Expo that I haven’t been able to shake.

“I believe the real catalyst behind the energy transition is not technology. It’s people. Technology can be acquired, infrastructure can be built, capital can be invested, but what cannot be easily replicated is a workforce empowered to innovate.”

That’s the mission. That’s what We Are Biogas is here to do.

The World Biogas Expo 2026 was held on 8-9 July at the NEC, Birmingham, co-organised by The Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association (ADBA) and the World Biogas Association. The AD & Biogas Industry Awards Gala took place on 8 July at the Vox, Birmingham. We Are Biogas attended as independent media.

We Are Biogas Exclusive

Field Report: Biomethane Day Ireland Where Ambition Meets the Hard Work of Delivery

🇮🇪 Ireland | We Are Biogas

I recently had the opportunity to attend Biomethane Day Ireland, and I left with one overwhelming takeaway: Ireland is standing at a truly defining moment. Organized by Gruppo AB - Energy Sustainability, the event brought together the people building Ireland’s biomethane sector, developers, policymakers, financiers, farmers, and the conversation was less about whether Ireland can do this and more about what’s standing in the way of doing it now.

The honest answer? Not much, and also quite a lot. But there are still gaps between what’s been committed to on paper and what’s been delivered on the ground. Implementation timelines. Support mechanisms. The legislative tools that turn a national strategy into a functioning market.

Richard Kennedy, put it simply: “The time for delivery is now.” And sitting in that room, surrounded by people who have clearly been waiting a long time to hear exactly that said out loud, it landed.

I’m already looking forward to Biomethane Day next year, because if this event was about setting the intention, next year’s should be about measuring the distance traveled.

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Policy & Capital

Japan and India Sign a Biogas Vehicle MOU and Target 1,000 Methane Plants

🇯🇵🇮🇳 Japan & India | Japan Times

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have exchanged a memorandum of understanding establishing a bilateral framework to promote biogas-powered vehicles in India, with a target of expanding the number of domestic methane production plants for CNG vehicles to 1,000. Suzuki Motor, which holds the largest share of India’s passenger vehicle market, where CNG already accounts for over 20% of new vehicle sales, will cooperate on the initiative and has already begun producing biogas in India under Japan’s Global South support programme. A head-of-government MOU puts biogas into the formal architecture of India-Japan geopolitical cooperation.

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Poland’s BGK Commits €25 Million to Pan-European Biomethane Fund

🇵🇱 Europe | Bioenergy Insight

Poland’s state development bank, Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego, has invested €25 million in SWEN Capital Partners‘ SWIFT 3 infrastructure fund, which targets biogas and biomethane development across Europe and OECD countries. SWIFT 3 is the third vehicle under SWEN’s strategy, launched in 2019. A sovereign development bank deploying capital into a pan-European biomethane fund signals two things simultaneously: that institutional appetite for the sector is maturing, and that Central and Eastern European capital is now actively participating in the European biomethane buildout rather than sitting on the sidelines watching Western Europe invest.

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Mumbai Plans a 350-TPD Compressed Biogas Facility One of India’s Largest Urban Biogas Projects

🇮🇳 India | Bioenergy Insight

Mumbai is developing a major compressed biogas facility at Mankhurd, following the signing of a concession agreement between the city’s civic administration and Mahanagar Gas Limited,Avcon Private Limited. The Mumbai Compressed Biogas Project will process up to 350 tonnes of biodegradable waste per day in its first phase, drawing primarily on waste from hotels, vegetable markets, and commercial kitchens. The facility will use anaerobic digestion to produce compressed biogas for transport and industrial applications. India’s largest city, treating its organic waste as an economic feedstock rather than a disposal problem, is a significant signal and an indication of how fast the urban biogas market is maturing across Indian metros.

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A Wiltshire AD Project Wins Planning Consent and Shows How Social License Gets Built

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | ENDS Waste & Bioenergy

A 75,000-tonne-per-year biogas project in Wiltshire has received planning consent, adding to a growing pipeline of permitted AD infrastructure in England following the mandatory food waste collection rollout. The project’s consent underlines a wider shift in how AD planning applications are being handled as organic waste diversion becomes a policy priority rather than a discretionary ambition. More consents, more feedstock, more pressure on the infrastructure to exist.

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Project Spotlights

Denmark’s BioCirc Ships First Biogenic CO₂ to the North Sea, Opening a New Revenue Stream for European Biogas

🇩🇰 Denmark | gasworld

Danish biomethane producer BioCirc has announced the departure of the first truck carrying captured biogenic CO₂ from its BECCS facility in Vesthimmerland, the world’s largest biogas-integrated carbon capture and storage facility. The biogenic CO₂ is being liquefied, transported to the port of Esbjerg, and permanently injected beneath the North Sea as part of Project Greensand. The Vesthimmerland plant is the first of five planned BECCS installations across BioCirc’s portfolio, targeting 32,500 tonnes of CO₂ captured annually at this site alone. Last month BioCirc finalized a seven-year agreement to deliver 650,000 tonnes of carbon removal units to Microsoft.

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Estonia Opens One of Its Largest Biomethane Facilities in Pärnu County

🇪🇪 Estonia | CEE Energy News

Infortar‘s subsidiary Halinga OÜ has officially opened one of Estonia’s largest biomethane plants in Pärnu County, utilizing agricultural waste to produce renewable gas for grid injection. The facility was built with EnviTec Biogas AG and supported by EU NextGenerationEU recovery funding. Infortar’s chairman noted at the opening that restoring Estonia’s dairy herd to early-1990s levels could theoretically supply the country’s entire gas demand, a statement that captures exactly why biogas’s relationship with agriculture is a structural story, not a project-level one.

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Archaea Energy and Republic Services Celebrate First Lightning Renewables RNG Plant in Indiana

🇺🇸 United States | Biomass Magazine

Archaea Energy, a subsidiary of bp, and Republic Services have celebrated the first RNG plant in their Lightning Renewables joint venture, located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with commercial production expected this summer. The partnership between a major waste management operator and one of the world’s largest energy companies, with Archaea’s technical infrastructure in the middle, is a model for how large-scale RNG development gets structured in the US. When bp’s capital, Republic Services’ feedstock access, and Archaea’s project development capability converge in a single joint venture, the result is the kind of pipeline that doesn’t stop at one plant.

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Canada’s First-of-Its-Kind RNG Plant Is Now Fully Operational in Blenheim, Ontario

🇨🇦 Canada | CK News Today

One of Canada’s first renewable natural gas plants is now fully operational in Blenheim, Ontario, described by local coverage as revolutionary for the region. The facility represents a milestone for Canada’s emerging RNG infrastructure, adding to a market that has been developing steadily but remains significantly below its potential relative to the country’s agricultural feedstock base. Canada’s RNG sector is producing real infrastructure now, plant by plant, community by community.

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Tech, Science & Innovation

EU’s TITAN Project Validates Microwave Technology That Converts Raw Biogas Into Hydrogen and Solid Carbon

🇪🇺 Europe | Sapo / Hydrogen Central

The Horizon Europe-funded TITAN project, nearing the end of its 48-month research programme, has validated a process that uses microwave energy to convert raw biogas directly into hydrogen-rich gas and solid carbon materials, combining multiple reaction steps in a single system and significantly reducing the need for additional gas treatment and separation. The process simultaneously produces renewable hydrogen and a solid carbon co-product that can support carbon storage. This is a meaningful advance on the conventional biogas-to-hydrogen pathway: fewer processing steps, a dual output, and a potential route to negative emissions. If it scales commercially, it changes the economics of small and remote biogas plants that currently have limited upgrading options.

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UFPB Researchers Build Open-Source Software to Calculate the Thermophysical Properties of Biogas

🇧🇷 Brazil | UFPB

Researchers at the Federal University of Paraíba have developed a computer program capable of calculating the thermophysical and energetic properties of biogas, including heat capacity, thermal conductivity, viscosity, and energy density, across variable composition profiles. Developed by the 2EXA research group at CEAR, the tool is designed to help engineers and project developers model biogas behavior more precisely across different feedstock compositions and operating conditions. It’s a technical rather than a commercial story, but it’s the kind of foundational tool that improves project design, reduces uncertainty in performance modeling, and lowers the barrier to entry for smaller operators who don’t have access to expensive proprietary simulation software.

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Tracking Melanoidins: New Research Identifies a Compound That’s Quietly Limiting Food Waste Biogas Recovery

🌍 Global | Newswise

A research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has clarified how melanoidins, dark compounds formed during the hydrothermal treatment of food waste, accumulate in the anaerobic digestion process and actively interfere with biogas production. Melanoidins are a Maillard reaction product: they form when organic material is heat-treated, and they resist microbial breakdown, building up in digestate and inhibiting the biological processes that produce methane. Knowing that melanoidins are a meaningful inhibitor and being able to track where they accumulate opens a pathway to process design changes that could recover biogas output that’s currently being lost without operators knowing why. The sector gets more from the same feedstock by understanding what’s slowing the biology down.

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Decentralised Biogas Model Could Unlock Biomethane for Small Farms Without Requiring Large Capital

🇪🇸 Spain / Global | Bioenergy Insight

Researchers from the Technical University of Madrid have proposed a new business model for biomethane production that pools resources across multiple small livestock farms producing biogas at each site but centralising upgrading infrastructure to achieve the scale needed to make grid injection commercially viable. Published in the journal Sustainable Development, the model addresses one of the most persistent structural barriers in agricultural biogas: the fact that most farms are too small to justify individual upgrading systems, but collectively represent a significant and largely untapped feedstock base. A shared upgrading model doesn’t require every farmer to build a full biomethane system. It requires enough farmers to contribute feedstock to one.

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Expansion & Trends

Scotland’s £10 Billion Biomethane Opportunity: 2.5% Utilisation, 19 TWh Potential, and a Sector Calling for a National Target

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland | Energy Digital

A report by the Green Gas Taskforce, supported by SGN and launched at the Royal Highland Show, estimates Scotland could unlock £10 billion in economic value and 8,000 jobs by scaling biomethane production to 19 TWh by 2050, equivalent to roughly half the country’s current gas demand. The number that stays with you is not the upside. It’s this: currently, just 2.5% of Scotland’s organic farm waste is being used to produce biomethane. The resource is there. The technology is proven. The economic case is documented. The gap between what Scotland has and what it’s using is a policy gap, and the taskforce is calling directly on government to fill it with a national biomethane target and the investment framework to match.

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We Are Biogas is an independent media platform covering the global biogas, biomethane, RNG, and anaerobic digestion industry. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter and follow the podcast for in-depth coverage, industry interviews, and sector analysis.

Walking into Gruppo AB’s Biomethane Day Ireland, I felt something I don’t always feel at industry events: genuine excitement with an edge of anticipation. Not the polished, press-release kind. The kind that comes from knowing the next era of something is close enough to touch, and that the gap between here and there is mostly a task list, not a pipe dream.

Things have happened. Things are happening. And a growing number of people in Ireland are ready to close that gap, now, and together. That’s what this room was.

The Scoreboard Is Honest. So Was the Room.

Ireland’s National Biomethane Strategy, launched in May 2024, set a target that doesn’t leave much room for slow starts: 5.7 TWh of indigenously produced biomethane annually by 2030, roughly 10% of national gas demand, underpinned by 140 to 200 new AD facilities nationwide.

Two years in, two operational biomethane facilities are injecting into the national gas grid, producing approximately 75 GWh per year. Less than 1.5% of the 2030 target. That number wasn’t hidden at Biomethane Day Ireland. It was the starting point.

This is what a sector in its delivery phase looks like when it’s being honest with itself: not minimizing the gap, not catastrophizing it, but naming it clearly so the room can get to work. Panel sessions covered the full architecture of what needs to move: regulation, permitting, health and safety standards, construction and project development, grid injection, and how Ireland’s trajectory compares to European markets that have been building this industry for a decade longer. That last comparison wasn’t made to embarrass anyone. It was made because Ireland has something those earlier markets didn’t: a roadmap of what worked, what stalled, and what killed projects at planning. That’s an advantage, if you use it.

The RHO: The Right Tool, Waiting to Be Sharpened

A significant portion of the day turned on the Renewable Heat Obligation, the demand-side mechanism that would obligate fossil fuel heat suppliers to blend increasing proportions of renewable gas into their supply, starting at 1.5% and scaling toward 10% by 2030. In principle, it’s the policy instrument that converts a national strategy into a functioning market. In practice, it’s still being worked out.

The RHO Bill cleared priority drafting and EU TRIS notification, but in March 2026, the European Commission issued a Detailed Opinion finding that the bill’s proposed multiplier for indigenously produced biomethane, the mechanism explicitly designed to make domestic production commercially competitive against cheaper imports, is incompatible with EU single market rules under Article 34 TFEU. The standstill period ran to the end of June. A redesign is now mandatory.

There was no diplomatic softening of this at Biomethane Day Ireland, and there shouldn’t have been. Ireland engineered a support mechanism to protect a nascent domestic industry, a rational and defensible position, and ran directly into single market principles that don’t accommodate national carve-outs, even well-intentioned ones.

Which is why what Minister Darragh O’Brien said in his keynote address mattered. Speaking to a sold-out conference, he confirmed his intention to publish the RHO in July, alongside the planned rollout of a €200m support scheme later this year. He was also unambiguous on the strategic positioning of the sector: biomethane, in his words, is “not a nice to have, but an imperative.” That’s a meaningful statement from a minister with the legislation on his desk, and it reflects a recognition that indigenous renewable gas isn’t peripheral to Ireland’s energy security, emissions reduction, and rural development agenda. It’s load-bearing.

The legislative intent is intact. The Sectoral Capital Plan 2026–2030 has committed €100m–€200m for biomethane from the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund. The capital grant programme is moving into a second round. The tools are here. Clarity of intent now needs to be matched by pace of delivery, and on that front, July is the first real test.

“The Time for Delivery Is Now.”

Richard Kennedy said it plainly: “The time for delivery is now.”

In a room full of people who have been carrying this industry forward through years of strategy documents and consultation periods and delayed legislation, that sentence landed differently than it might have somewhere else. It wasn’t a rallying cry. It was an acknowledgment of where the sector is, of how long it’s taken to get here, and of what everyone in the room already knew.

Tom O’Brien, Group CEO of Nephin Energy, framed it in similar terms: the case for biomethane in Ireland has never been clearer. The feedstock base is agricultural and abundant. Gas Networks Ireland has the grid infrastructure. The financing community is at the table. The comparison to mature European biomethane markets: Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, isn’t a source of embarrassment; it’s a source of intelligence. Ireland can learn from what those markets have built and compress the development timeline as a result.

What it still needs is the legislative layer fully in place and functional. The RHO redesigned and enacted. The planning and permitting framework streamlined. The consenting environment consistent enough that a project can model its timeline with confidence. These aren’t abstract policy asks, they’re the specific blockers between where Ireland is today and where it has committed to be by 2030.

This Event Is Doing Something Real

Biomethane Day Ireland is a young conference, but it’s filling a gap that matters. The Irish biomethane sector is at exactly the stage where the industry needs to be in the same room: developers, farmers, grid operators, financiers, and policymakers working through the same problems with access to the same information at the same time. That alignment is not a given. Events that create it are worth paying attention to.

I’m already thinking about what Biomethane Day 2027 looks like. If this edition was about setting the intention, delivery, and the collective will to get there, then next year’s event should be about measuring the distance traveled. How many projects moved from feasibility to finance? How many plants broke ground? How did the RHO redesign land? Did the capital grant programme move fast enough to matter?

Now comes the part where the industry finds out what it’s actually made of.

Biomethane Day Ireland 2026 was organized by Gruppo AB / Biomethane RNG Channel and sponsored by Nephin Energy. We Are Biogas attended as independent media.

In 2020, the International Energy Agency published its first dedicated report on biogas and biomethane. It was called Prospects for Organic Growth. The title itself tells you something about where the conversation was at the time: cautious, curious, exploratory. The report asked whether biogas could play a meaningful role in the global energy transition. It mapped feedstocks, modeled scenarios, and made the case that organic waste could become a modern energy resource. It was a thorough piece of analysis. It was also, essentially, a question.

Five years later, the IEA came back with its answer.

The 2025 Outlook for Biogas and Biomethane opened with a declaration that would have sounded ambitious in 2020: “Biogases play an important and growing role in energy systems.” Not a promising option. Not a sector worth watching. A solution, specific, present tense, and overdue for attention. By the time the 2025 report dropped, the IEA had conducted a first-of-its-kind geospatial analysis across over five million locations worldwide and arrived at a number that reframes what this industry is actually sitting on.

Nearly one trillion cubic meters of biogas equivalent, producible sustainably every year, from today’s organic waste streams alone. That’s equivalent to one quarter of global natural gas demand.

The question has been answered. The industry now has to decide what to do with that answer.

What 2020 Looked Like

It’s worth going back to what the 2020 report actually found, because the contrast with 2025 is where the story of this industry’s last five years lives.

In 2020, the IEA estimated that biogas and biomethane investments had averaged less than $4 billion per year over the prior decade. To put that in context, the report noted that this was the same amount the natural gas industry typically spends every week. Biomethane plants worldwide were expected to exceed 1,000 in the course of 2020, a milestone the report noted with optimism, though that number looks modest now. The sector’s combined market share in total modern bioenergy demand stood at 5%, with projections reaching 12% by 2040 under the Stated Policies Scenario.

The framework was one of potential and uncertainty. Biogas was a technology that worked, a feedstock base that existed, and a policy environment that hadn’t yet decided what to do with either.

The word the 2020 report returned to, over and over, was “untapped.”

What 2025 Looks Like

The word in 2025 is “strategic.”

Where the 2020 report mapped what was possible, the 2025 report makes the case for what’s necessary. The shift in register is significant. As the World Biogas Association put it so eloquently, biogas and biomethane are now described as…

“…emerging as strategic fuels for decarbonising sectors that electricity alone cannot easily reach, such as heavy industry, long-haul transport, and heating.”

The flexibility, storability, and dispatchability of biogas, the qualities that made it interesting in 2020, are now framed as indispensable, not optional.

The numbers have moved, too. Global production of biogas and biomethane reached approximately 50 billion cubic meters in 2023, representing growth from the 2020 baseline and a sector meaningfully larger than when the IEA first went looking at it. Since 2020, more than 50 new policy frameworks have been introduced worldwide. The 2025 IEA forecast projects a 22% increase in combined production between 2025 and 2030, and when you filter that down to medium and large-scale projects specifically, projected growth jumps to around 80%.

But the headline from 2025 isn’t the growth forecast. It’s the utilization figure. Of the nearly one trillion cubic meters of sustainable biogas potential that exists globally, the world is currently accessing just 5%. The EU, the most developed biogas market on earth, is harnessing around 40% of its potential from waste feedstocks alone.

The gap between what we know is available and what we’re actually using is the defining fact of this industry right now.

Where the Numbers Are Coming From

Europe remains the dominant producing region, accounting for close to half of all global output. Total European production reached 22 billion cubic meters in 2024, a volume equivalent to the entire inland gas demand of Belgium, Denmark, and Ireland combined, per the EBA’s 15th Statistical Report.

The European market has reshuffled significantly since 2020. France has overtaken Germany as the continent’s largest biomethane producer, posting a 21% higher production share and a threefold advantage in number of plants, according to the EBA’s 2025 Biomethane Investment Outlook. Germany has remained relatively stable since 2017, held back by regulatory uncertainty and an aging plant fleet. Italy, Denmark, and the Netherlands remain major contributors, though year-on-year growth in those markets has been comparatively slower. Ireland, Spain, and Poland are scaling from low baselines, with Poland injecting its first biomethane into the grid in 2025.

The shift from raw biogas to biomethane is the defining trend across all of it. EU biomethane grew 14% year-on-year in 2024 against just 1% for biogas, per IEA Renewables 2025. Europe closed 2024 with 1,620 biomethane-producing facilities, and installed capacity hit 7 bcm per year by early 2025. Further, the €671 million corporate financing closed by Verdalia Bioenergy in October 2025, backed by Goldman Sachs and a consortium of seven international banks, to develop 3 TWh of biomethane capacity across Spain and Italy, was described by the company as the first and largest of its kind in the European biomethane sector. That kind of transaction doesn’t happen in a market that institutional capital hasn’t figured out.

In the US, the growth story has been consistent and significant. The American Biogas Council's most recent data shows 70 new biogas projects came online in 2025, representing more than $2 billion in new investment and pushing the total number of US facilities to nearly 2,600. Industry-wide capture capacity increased 7.5% to reach 780.7 billion cubic feet per year. RNG production rose 24% in 2025 alone, with 659 facilities now producing renewable natural gas, up from just 217 in 2020, a threefold increase in five years. For context on production volume, the IEA's Renewables 2025 report puts US biomethane output at around 136 petajoules, with the market described as one of the most dynamic globally, accelerating since 2022 on the back of California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard and the federal Renewable Fuel Standard.

Europe and the US are the established story. The more interesting question is what’s happening everywhere else.

In 2025, India made biogas blending legally mandatory for the first time. Gas suppliers must now blend biogas into their supply, starting at 1% and rising to 5% by 2028-29. Mandatory demand is a different beast from voluntary ambition, and sales in 2024-25 already surpassed everything India had sold in the five previous years combined. In a country with a potential of up to 86 billion cubic meters a year, against the current output of 3.2 billion. China is mid-pivot. Decades of small household units giving way to industrial-scale plants, state energy companies commissioning projects, and in 2024, the country’s first commercial biomethane contracts signed, all against a potential of 150 to 200 billion cubic meters a year versus the current capacity of just 300 million. And Brazil passed a law in October 2024 requiring gas companies to use biogas for the first time, 1% rising to a potential ceiling of 10%, with Petrobras launching an 11-year procurement programme in response, in a market where 930 plants are currently producing less than 2% of what the country’s agricultural waste alone could supply. Three very different countries that have looked at their organic waste, their energy bills, and their climate targets, and arrived at the same conclusion.

The Number That Stays With You

The 2025 IEA report contains one figure that this industry should be putting in every conversation it has with policymakers, investors, and anyone else who hasn’t yet worked out why biogas matters.

Harnessing global potential from manure alone, one feedstock category, universally available, already being generated whether we capture it or not, would avoid 1,000 million tonnes of CO2 from agriculture and a further 400 million tonnes from fossil fuel substitution. Manure. The thing that currently rots in fields and flows into waterways. The thing that generates methane, regardless of whether anyone captures it.

The IEA also found that five times the current level of global biomethane production could be developed at a cost equal to or lower than prevailing wholesale natural gas prices. The economics aren’t the barrier. The architecture around the economics is.

That architecture is what the five years between 2020 and 2025 have been building, imperfectly, unevenly, and not fast enough to meet the EU’s 35 billion cubic meter target for 2030, which current national plans fall approximately 25% short of. But building nonetheless.

Harnessing global potential from manure alone, one feedstock category, universally available, already being generated whether we capture it or not, would avoid 1,000 million tonnes of CO2 from agriculture and a further 400 million tonnes from fossil fuel substitution. Manure. The thing that currently rots in fields and flows into waterways. The thing that generates methane, regardless of whether anyone captures it.

The IEA also found that five times the current level of global biomethane production could be developed at a cost equal to or lower than prevailing wholesale natural gas prices. Meaning, the economics aren’t the barrier. The architecture around the economics is.

That architecture is what the five years between 2020 and 2025 have been building, imperfectly, unevenly, and not fast enough to meet the EU’s 35 billion cubic meter target for 2030, which current national plans fall approximately 25% short of. But building nonetheless.

What the Shift Actually Means

The IEA doesn’t change its language without reason. When the framing moves from “prospects” to “strategic necessity,” when biogas earns its first-ever dedicated chapter in the flagship Renewables report, when Dr. Fatih Birol stands at the launch of Renewables 2025 and says that “the pace of growth of renewables will be determined by governments,” that’s not editorial generosity. That’s recognition that the argument has been made, the data supports it, and what comes next is a question of political and financial will.

For those of us inside this industry, the shift is validation of work that has been going on for decades. For those encountering biogas for the first time, it’s an invitation to look more carefully at something that has been hiding in plain sight. In the manure, the food waste, the sewage sludge, and the agricultural residues that modern economies generate at scale, every single day.

The 2020 report asked whether biogas could play a role. The 2025 report says it has to. The distance between those two statements is where this industry has spent the last five years, and it’s a distance worth measuring.

We Are Biogas is an independent media platform covering the global biogas, biomethane, RNG, and anaerobic digestion industry. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter and follow the podcast for in-depth coverage, industry interviews, and sector analysis.

We Are Biogas Exclusive

Field Report: The Site Turning London’s Rubbish Into Power and Fertiliser. A Look Inside The Process.

By Alexandra Arndt · June 15

I recently visited Willen Biogas in Enfield on the outskirts of London alongside Flávio Ascenco of Agile Biogas, and for the first time, I got to step behind the gates of a working anaerobic digestion site and see the process for myself. The tanks. The intake bay. The CHP unit. The digestate leaving the facility as PAS 110-certified fertiliser ready for farmland. The whole extraordinary, unglamorous, essential system in motion.

Biogas doesn’t need a better argument. It needs more people pulling back the curtain on the operators and the teams turning waste into a resource inside these tanks every single day. This is that.

“We solve three problems with one massive problem — waste.” Flávio Asceco | Director & Co-Founder | ABEC

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Policy & Capital

Mexico’s SENER Builds the Technical Framework That Will Open the Biomethane Market

🇲🇽 Mexico | Mexico Business News

Mexico’s energy ministry SENER is developing a full technical and regulatory framework, including a new Official Mexican Standard (NOM), to operationalize the country’s biomethane market and enable grid injection. The work involves coordination across SENER, Semarnat, and SADER alongside major gas network operators, including Naturgy México and Gasoductos y Estaciones del Norte. A NOM is a binding technical standard, the kind of instrument that lets projects actually get permitted, financed, and built. Mexico has the organic waste base. SENER is now building the rules that unlock it.

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South Korea Invests $27.5 Million to Localise Biogas Generator Technology

🇰🇷 South Korea | Bioenergy Insight

South Korea’s Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment is launching a 36.6 billion won programme to localise key technologies for biogas power generation systems, reducing reliance on imported generators and components as the domestic market expands. The funding comprises 26 billion won from the national budget and 10.6 billion won from private sector contributions. This is industrial policy doing what it’s supposed to do using a market expansion moment to build domestic supply chain capability rather than simply importing the technology to run it. South Korea is building a biogas sector that doesn’t depend on foreign infrastructure to function.

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Malaysia and South Korea Formalize Biogas and Carbon Neutrality Cooperation

🇲🇾🇰🇷 Malaysia & South Korea | BioEnergy Times

Korea Environment Corporation (K-eco), in collaboration with the South Korean Embassy in Malaysia, has formalized cooperation on biogas development and carbon neutrality between the two countries. Malaysia’s palm oil and agricultural waste base gives it significant feedstock potential. South Korea’s regulatory and technology development pace gives it implementation credibility. Bilateral cooperation at this level is how emerging biogas markets accelerate, not by reinventing infrastructure from scratch, but by borrowing what already works.

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DOE Releases Updated 45ZCF-GREET Model, Delivering Long-Awaited Certainty to the US Renewable Fuel Industry

🇺🇸 United States | Biodiesel Magazine

The US Department of Energy released an updated version of the 45ZCF-GREET model on June 12. The tool used to calculate fuel emissions rates for the 45Z clean fuel production credit. The update delivers much-needed regulatory certainty for the renewable fuel sector, including RNG producers, who have been waiting for clear guidance on how their production pathways will be scored. For biogas and biomethane projects, how emissions are calculated determines how credits are valued and how projects are financed. This resolves the ambiguity that was slowing investment decisions.

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Project Spotlights

Anaergia’s SoCal Biomethane Facility Makes History as California’s First SB 1440 RNG Delivery

🇺🇸 United States | Business Wire

Anaergia has begun delivering renewable natural gas from its SoCal Biomethane facility in Victorville, California, to Southwest Gas Corporation‘s distribution system, the first RNG delivery under California’s SB 1440 Biomethane Procurement Program. The facility, located at the Victor Valley Wastewater Reclamation Authority, co-digests municipal wastewater solids and diverted organic waste from across Southern California, processing up to 104,000 tonnes annually with potential to cut emissions by up to 31,710 tonnes of CO₂e per year. State procurement policy, utility offtake, and commercial-scale organic waste processing, all operating together in a single project. That’s what proof of concept actually looks like.

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PGB Completes Major Expansion at Dzierżki — Poland’s Biogas Sector Quietly Scales

🇵🇱 Poland | CEE Energy News

Polska Grupa Biogazowa has completed a significant expansion of its biogas facility in Dzierżki, adding to PGB’s growing operational footprint across Poland. The pattern here is worth noting: capacity consolidation happening quietly within Central and Eastern European biogas markets, well away from the headline investment announcements. Expansion of existing sites rather than greenfield development is often the most capital-efficient growth pathway available to established operators. In markets where permitting and community acceptance are already in place, it’s also the fastest. PGB is building that way.

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Bahiagás Signs Biomethane Protocol Using Agricultural Residues in Western Bahia

🇧🇷 Brasil Movimento Econômico

Bahiagás - Companhia de Gás da Bahia has signed a protocol with CIBiogás - Instituição de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação - Biogás e outras Energias Renováveis, Captar Agrobusiness, and partners to produce biomethane from agroindustrial residues in the Oeste Baiano region of Bahia, with an announced investment of R$500,000. The project targets organic waste streams from one of Brazil’s most active agribusiness corridors. Brazil’s biomethane buildout is increasingly happening at the state level, driven by regional gas utilities and local agricultural feedstock density. Bahiagás entering this space signals that the country’s domestic gas distribution network is beginning to treat biomethane as a genuine supply source, not a novelty sitting at the edge of the portfolio.

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Tech, Science & Innovation

World First: Circularity Fuels Converts Raw Dairy Biogas Directly Into Jet Fuel

🇺🇸 United States | World Bio Market Insights

Circularity Fuels has announced the successful completion of the world’s first end-to-end pilot converting raw agricultural biogas directly into sustainable aviation fuel. Over six months, a California dairy farm’s manure digester supplied biogas, approximately 65% methane and 35% CO₂, which the pilot system processed into jet fuel meeting ASTM D7566 certification standards using a modular, low-cost system. This eliminates the conventional biomethane upgrading step entirely, converting raw biogas to SAF in a single pathway. Dairy waste to jet fuel, end to end. That’s a first worth paying close attention to.

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BiofuelAi Wins the UK Government’s £1 Million Manchester Prize for AI-Driven AD Optimisation

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Envirotec

BiofuelAi, a University of Surrey spinout based in Guildford, has won the UK government’s flagship Manchester Prize, securing £1 million for its AI-powered decision support platform designed for anaerobic digestion operators. The platform builds a digital twin of biogas plant operations, combining mechanistic modelling, machine learning, and hybrid AI to give operators real-time insight into the biological processes inside their digesters. Early pilots showed revenue improvements of 6–10% and carbon emissions reductions of 28%. By 2030, the company estimates the platform could mitigate 293,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year across the UK, equivalent to heating 133,000 homes. The biogas sector has long been one of the least data-driven corners of the energy industry. This is what it looks like when that starts to change.

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Generate Upcycle Builds Out Engineering and Compliance Infrastructure as Organics Recycling Mandates Tighten

🇺🇸 United States | TipRanks

Generate Upcycle, a private waste-to-energy and organics recycling platform, is strengthening its engineering and compliance infrastructure in direct response to the expanding US organics recycling policy environment. The company’s moves reflect a calculated bet that regulatory pressure on organic waste diversion is not cyclical, it’s structural. As states and municipalities tighten landfill diversion mandates, the companies with the compliance infrastructure already in place are the ones that win the contracts when those mandates bite. Generate Upcycle is building that position now.

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Expansion & Trends

US Dairy Biogas Capacity Has Nearly Tripled Since 2020 — and the Pipeline Keeps Growing

🇺🇸 United States | Bioenergy Insight

New data from the American Biogas Council shows that the number of US dairy farms capturing energy from manure has nearly tripled since the end of 2020. There are now 496 dairy farms using anaerobic digestion to convert manure into RNG or electricity, processing manure from approximately 2.5 million cows. The US dairy biogas sector is now large enough to anchor a supply chain, generate policy credibility, and serve as a reference point for markets still in earlier stages. Three times the capacity in five years. The compounding is real.

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Nebraska Builds a First-of-Its-Kind Plant to Turn Cattle Manure Into Pipeline-Quality RNG

🇺🇸 United States | Cowboy State Daily

A first-of-its-kind renewable natural gas facility is under construction in central Nebraska, designed to convert cattle manure into pipeline-quality natural gas. Nebraska sits at the intersection of two structural advantages: one of the largest cattle industries in the United States, and proximity to gas pipeline infrastructure that can move product to market. The project adds to a growing picture of the US Great Plains as a significant emerging geography for agricultural RNG, following last week’s East Valley Cattle story out of Idaho. The feedstock has always been there. The infrastructure to monetize it is catching up.

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Want to be featured? Email: alexandra@wearebiogas.com

Flávio Ascenco talks about biogas the way some people talk about architecture, not as a system to be managed but as something to be understood at the level of its constituent parts, its logic, its relationship to the environment it sits inside. By the time we arrived at Willen Biogas in Enfield, on the outskirts of London, I had already learned more in a single conversation than most people absorb in a year of reading about this sector. That, it turns out, was entirely intentional. He wanted me to really see the site before I saw it.

And what I actually saw when we pulled up stopped me for a moment.

The gate closes behind you, and you just stand there briefly, taking it all in. Because the tanks, the actual, physical, full-scale anaerobic digestion tanks, look exactly like every diagram and every photograph you have ever seen of them, and somehow that makes them feel less real, not more. Like stepping into a rendering. You know intellectually that this is a working industrial site on the outskirts of London. But your eyes need a few seconds to catch up with the fact that you are actually, finally, standing in front of one.

You’d drive past this site a hundred times on the outskirts of London and have no idea that inside those sealed vessels, something extraordinary is happening. And for the first time, I was able to step foot behind the scenes of a biogas site and experience that waste-to-energy magic firsthand.

The Tour

Willen Biogas is processing close to 30,000 tonnes of food waste annually, sourced from restaurants, canteens, and local authority collection facilities across London. Some of it originates within miles of the city centre. The transfer costs and transport emissions that make urban food waste processing economically marginal in so many places are, by design, not a problem here. Proximity to the source is not incidental to this site’s value proposition. It is central to it.

Flávio walked me through the full process. Loads arrive at the intake bay, are visually inspected for contamination, and directed through mechanical separation equipment that isolates plastics and contaminants before the organic fraction enters the digestion system. What arrives as mixed food waste exits as three distinct products: renewable electricity generated via a combined heat and power (CHP) unit capable of processing 1.5MWh, which could supply enough energy for approximately 4,000 homes; heat recovered and used on site; and a PAS 110-certified digestate, a spreading-ready, organic agricultural fertiliser product that leaves the facility no longer classified as waste. It leaves as something the farming sector actively needs and uses.

As Flávio puts it so eloquently and succinctly, “We solve three problems with one massive problem — waste.”

The carbon mathematics running underneath all of this are not incidental either. Methane emitted from organic waste decomposing in landfill carries a global warming potential “85 to 88 times greater than CO₂ over a twenty-year period,” the timeframe most relevant to the emissions commitments governments are being held to. Capturing that methane, converting it to energy, and simultaneously displacing synthetic fertiliser production delivers a compounding emissions benefit. Standing on a working site, watching the system run, makes that argument considerably easier to grasp than any policy document manages to.

"Food waste will grow every year. The potential is there, the opportunity is there, and it will continue to be."

The Training Session

After the tour, Flávio gathered the site staff. I took a seat at the back of the room.

What followed was a structured, formal training session, with Flávio at the front, walking the team methodically through the fundamentals of anaerobic digestion. The biology. The process stages. The reasons why certain operational decisions matter more than they might appear to in the moment. These are the operators who help run Willen Biogas day in and day out. And Flávio was in front of them, making sure that the people responsible for keeping this plant performing understood it from the inside out.

"It's not only building these sites. There needs to be an element of expertise, technical and operational, that ensures it's not only an asset but a performing asset."

That room told me more about why this site works than the tour did.

A biogas plant is not a passive asset. It is a living system, biological, mechanical, and operational simultaneously, and it performs exactly as well as the people managing it understand it. The industry has invested heavily in building physical capacity over the last decade. It has invested considerably less in ensuring that capacity is matched by the operational and technical expertise needed to extract full value from it. The gap between a plant that exists and a plant that performs is not an engineering problem. It is a people problem. And it is where Agile Biogas works.

Watching Flávio command that room, precise, knowledgeable, and entirely at ease, translating complex biological processes into operational clarity for a team with boots on the ground, it became apparent that his value to a site like this operates on two levels simultaneously. He is the expert who understands the system. He is also the person who ensures everyone responsible for the system understands it too. That distinction matters more than the sector currently gives it credit for.

What I Keep Coming Back To

The challenge biogas has always faced relative to solar and wind is one of visibility. Photovoltaic panels and wind turbines are legible at a glance. Anaerobic digestion is sealed, subterranean, and largely invisible by design. That invisibility has cost the sector considerably in public understanding and policy priority, not because the technology is less capable, but because the impression it makes requires proximity.

What this visit clarified is that the visibility problem runs deep. The operators running these sites, the trainers developing the expertise that keeps them performing, the teams who show up every day to manage a biological process most of the world does not know exists, they are the story the sector has been underreporting. The training session I sat in at Willen Biogas was not a headline moment. It was not designed to be documented or celebrated. It was simply Flávio doing what he does, making sure the people behind the process understand it well enough to keep it running at its full capacity.

That is what a performing AD site looks like.

What Comes Next

I am already counting down the days until my next site visit.

There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from standing inside the industry you cover, from watching a trainer hold a room, from understanding that the PAS 110 certificate leaving with the digestate tanker exists because someone took the time to make sure the people on the floor knew why it mattered. That is not a technology story. It is a people story. And it is one We Are Biogas intends to tell a great deal more of.

If you operate a site and would like us to come and document it, the process, the team, the expertise that keeps it performing, get in touch. These stories exist everywhere, running behind fences in industrial estates and on farm edges across the world. They deserve a louder signal.

The infrastructure is already doing the work. So are the people inside it. It’s time the story caught up.

Watch the full Willen Biogas video feature, filmed on site with Flávio Ascenco of Agile Biogas, at the link above.

For consulting, training, technical input, or project development enquiries, contact Flávio at flavio.ascenco@agilebiogas.com or find out more at agilebiogas.com

We’re also watching Mexico write the regulatory foundations that will finally allow biomethane into its gas grid, industrial manufacturing in Italy sign one of the country’s first long-term biomethane supply agreements, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries verify a technology that could boost biogas output by 40% on existing infrastructure — without any additional feedstock.

In this episode, we cover:

• India and Japan open high-level talks on cooperative-led compressed biogas development through dairy cooperatives — routing international expertise through rural agricultural institutions rather than industrial players

• Mexico develops a roadmap for biomethane grid injection, building the regulatory foundation that transforms domestic organic waste into a networked energy commodity

• The EBRD approves a €26 million InvestEU-backed loan to HoSt Group’s Next Biogas to convert Latvia’s Lēdurga plant into one of the Baltic’s largest biomethane facilities — 80,070 MWh annually, with biogenic CO₂ capture as a co-product

• Pure Data Centres Group completes Europe’s first large-scale cross-border biomethane deal for a data centre — 9GWh of certified German biomethane transferred to the Irish gas network in a single transaction

• Fedrigoni Group signs one of Italy’s first long-term biomethane supply agreements in manufacturing — covering 40% of its Italian plants’ gas requirements and cutting cradle-to-gate emissions by up to 50%

• Vanguard Renewables breaks ground on a 300-tonne-per-day anaerobic digestion facility in Minnesota, producing 270,000 MMBtu of RNG annually and creating 100 jobs for the region

• Royal HaskoningDHV deploys Anglian Water’s Helea® technology at one of the world’s largest wastewater treatment plant upgrades in Brazil — a retrofit model with implications for underutilized digestion infrastructure globally

• Mitsubishi Heavy Industries achieves verification of a zeolite-based purification system capable of boosting biogas production by up to 40% on existing infrastructure — no additional feedstock required

• EcoSimplex begins commercial operation of Seoul’s first biogas-to-hydrogen station in Magok — processing 4,000 Nm³ of sewage biogas daily into 500kg of hydrogen for buses, police vehicles and fuel-cell cars, with an 85% emissions reduction versus grey hydrogen

• AURI and Swedish firm BPC Instruments partner to develop biogas market opportunities from agricultural residues at Minnesota’s Bio-industrial Innovation Center

• Clean Energy Fuels starts up the East Valley Cattle RNG plant in Jerome, Idaho — its eighth dairy facility and one of the largest single-site dairies and RNG operations in North America

Exclusive: We Are Biogas sits down with Lidija Zelić, head of the Serbian Biogas Association, for a conversation that goes well beyond sector development and regulatory progress. This is a story about villages trying to survive, farmers building new futures from their land, women holding rural communities together, and young people being given a reason to stay. Sixteen years of trust built one farm visit, one difficult conversation, and one community at a time. Full article read-through included.

If you work in renewable gas, waste management, infrastructure investment, agricultural energy, circular economy, or climate policy — this one is for you.

📩 We Are Biogas subscribers have exclusive access to a 5% discount on the Global NRG Advisory Project Finance Masterclass. Six live modules on how you actually fund a biogas project, led by Chris Negus and Andrew Rice. Cohorts are capped at 15 seats and they are going fast. Use code WEAREBIO at checkout, or DM Chris Negus directly and tell him We Are Biogas sent you.

🌍 Explore more stories, insights, and media from across the global biogas industry:

https://wearebiogas.com

📩 Want your story told, or have a topic you want us to cover next?
Reach out directly: alexandra@wearebiogas.com

🔗 Let’s connect and keep the conversation going:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrarng/

Want to be featured? Email me.

We Are Biogas Exclusive

Boots in the Trunk: Serbia's 16-Year Biogas Story and The Villages It Refused to Let Die

By Alexandra Arndt · June 8

Lidija Zelić has been building Serbia's biogas sector for over a decade, from the ground up, in the most literal sense. As head of the Serbian Biogas Association, she's spent 16 years doing farm site visits, difficult community conversations, university lectures, and ministry meetings, often on the same day. Her take on what actually makes this sector work, trust, rural community investment, and showing up when there's no camera, is one of the most honest accounts of what the energy transition looks like outside the headlines. If you read one thing this week, make it this.

"Trust is not a 'soft' topic or an additional layer around a project, but a very concrete factor that directly influences how stable and sustainable a project's development will be over the long term."

Lidija Zelić |Serbian Biogas Association

Read the Article

Policy & Capital

India–Japan Dairy Diplomacy Opens a New Lane for Cooperative-Led Biogas Development

🇮🇳🇯🇵 India & Japan | Japan Forward

India and Japan are formalizing cooperation on compressed biogas development through dairy cooperatives, with discussions between the Ministry of Cooperation and Japan's METI centering on CBG plants that convert cattle waste into clean fuel and fertiliser. This is strategically significant for two reasons: it routes international technical expertise through cooperative structures rather than industrial players, and it directly links biogas expansion to India's rural income framework. The model, biogas embedded within the cooperative dairy ecosystem, could become a scalable template for the Global South's agricultural biogas buildout.

Read the Article

Mexico Writes New Rules for Biomethane Grid Injection, Opening a Market That's Been Waiting

🇲🇽 Mexico | BNamericas

Mexico is developing a roadmap to expand biogas production that includes new regulations enabling biomethane injection into pipelines — a structural prerequisite that has until now blocked the sector's maturation. The framing here is explicitly energy sovereignty: reducing reliance on imported natural gas by monetizing domestic organic waste streams. A regulatory foundation enabling grid injection transforms biomethane from an off-grid niche into a networked commodity. That shift is what unlocks institutional capital, and Mexico's organic waste base gives it meaningful supply potential once the pathway exists

Read the Article

EBRD's €26M Latvia Bet Is a Signal for the Entire Baltic Biomethane Market

🇱🇻 Latvia | EBRD

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has approved a €26 million loan to HoSt Group's subsidiary Next Biogas to convert an existing agricultural biogas plant in Lēdurga into one of Latvia's largest biomethane facilities, producing approximately 80,070 MWh annually. The deal was signed at the EBRD's 2026 Annual Meeting in Riga and is backed by the EU's InvestEU guarantee. The facility will also capture biogenic CO₂ as a co-product. What matters here isn't the single project — it's the signal. Institutional lending at this scale, in a market this early-stage, sets precedent for how Baltic biomethane gets financed going forward.

Read the Article

Project Spotlights

Pure DC Closes Europe's First Large-Scale Cross-Border Biomethane Deal for a Data Centre

🇩🇪🇮🇪 Germany → Ireland | Capacity

Pure Data Centres Group has transferred 9GWh of certified German biomethane to the Irish gas network in a single transaction, marking what it describes as the first large-scale cross-border biomethane purchase for a data centre in Europe. This is a landmark for two converging trends: the emergence of data centres as a credible demand anchor for biomethane, and the maturation of cross-border certification and transport infrastructure that makes such deals executable. A functioning biomethane market is one where supply and demand can clear across borders.

Read the Article

Fedrigoni Secures One of Italy's First Long-Term Biomethane Supply Deals in Manufacturing

🇮🇹 Italy | Bioenergy Insight

Fedrigoni Group has signed a long-term biomethane supply agreement covering around 40% of the gas requirements at its Italian manufacturing plants, with a projected carbon footprint reduction of 30–50% at those sites, depending on product line. The deal involves Verdalia Bioenergy, CH1, and Fri-El. This is worth watching because it's not transport, it's not power, and it's not a pilot — it's biomethane embedded in an industrial manufacturing supply chain at meaningful scale. It's a reminder that biomethane's demand story extends well beyond transport and power — industrial heat is a real and growing part of the picture.

Read the Article

Vanguard Renewables Breaks Ground on 300-TPD Minnesota AD Facility

🇺🇸 United States | Food Engineering

Vanguard Renewables has broken ground on an anaerobic digestion facility in Minnesota designed to process more than 300 tonnes of food and beverage waste per day and produce roughly 270,000 MMBtu of renewable natural gas per year, providing regional manufacturers, retailers, and distributors with an alternative to landfill disposal. Beyond the production benefits, the construction is also projected to create around 100 jobs. The project adds to a growing pattern of large-scale, commercially integrated AD infrastructure targeting the food sector waste stream in the US Midwest, a region with the feedstock density to sustain it.

Read the Article

Anglian Water's Helea® Technology Heads to One of the World's Largest Wastewater Plants in Brazil

🇬🇧🇧🇷 UK / Brazil | Water Magazine

Royal HaskoningDHV is deploying Helea® technology, developed by Anglian Water, at one of the largest wastewater treatment plant upgrades in the world, located in Brazil. The move represents both a technology export moment and a signal about where large-scale wastewater digestion infrastructure is being built. The underlying logic is consistent across markets: existing wastewater treatment infrastructure is an underutilized biogas feedstock base, and retrofitting it with advanced digestion technology is among the most cost-effective pathways to scaling production without developing greenfield sites.

Read the Article

Tech, Science & Innovation

MHI's Zeolite Technology Could Boost Biogas Output by 40% and It's Just Been Verified

🇯🇵 Japan | gasworld

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has had a zeolite-based biogas purification and enhancement system verified by the Japan Environmental Sanitation Center, with claims of boosting biogas generation by up to 40%. The technology addresses one of the key efficiency constraints in AD systems, ensuring a stable, high-quality raw material supply for consistent gas output. A 40% production uplift on existing infrastructure, without additional feedstock, is not a marginal improvement. If the verification holds at commercial scale, this is the kind of process intensification technology that changes the economics of existing plants significantly.

Read the Article

Seoul's Sewage Is Now Fuelling Buses: EcoSimplex Opens Korea's First Biogas-to-Hydrogen Station

🇰🇷 South Korea | Fuel Cells Works

EcoSimplex has begun commercial operation of its ECO-Hydrogen Station in Magok, Seoul — the first project under South Korea's Ministry of Climate program supporting biogas-based clean hydrogen production to reach commercial operation using an on-site model. The facility processes around 4,000 Nm³ of biogas daily from a nearby sewage treatment plant to produce approximately 500 kg of hydrogen, supplied to route buses, police buses, and fuel-cell passenger cars. Claimed emissions reduction versus grey hydrogen: more than 85%. This is a clean proof-of-concept for the waste-to-hydrogen pathway, and a challenge to the assumption that green hydrogen is the only credible low-carbon alternative.

Read the Article

AURI and BPC Instruments Partner to Unlock Agricultural Residue Biogas Potential in Minnesota

🇺🇸 United States | Brownfield Ag News

The Agricultural Utilization Research Institute (AURI) in Minnesota has announced a research partnership with Swedish firm BPC Instruments to expand biogas market opportunities from agricultural residues and organic waste streams. The collaboration will be based at AURI's Bio-industrial Innovation Center in Waseca, focusing on method development and hands-on training. US agricultural biogas still has significant untapped potential in its residue streams, beyond the dairy manure infrastructure that's dominated recent growth. Partnerships like this one, linking Scandinavian analytical expertise with Midwestern feedstock reality, are how the methodology gets developed before the projects follow.

Read the Article

Expansion & Trends

Clean Energy Fuels Starts Up Idaho's East Valley Cattle RNG Plant — One of North America's Largest Single-Site Dairy Facilities

🇺🇸 United States | Rigzone

Clean Energy Fuels has begun production at its eighth dairy RNG facility, the East Valley Cattle plant in Jerome, Idaho, processing more than 5 million gallons of manure per day in what the company describes as one of the largest single-site dairies and RNG facilities in North America. The project is a further demonstration of the US dairy sector's role as the anchor feedstock category for American RNG infrastructure. At this scale, dairy RNG is no longer a niche application. It's a primary production category, and Clean Energy's continued vertical expansion reinforces that the market is building toward production at a level that warrants serious pipeline consideration.

Read the Article

We Are Biogas Subscribers still have a 5% doscount!

I’ve teamed up with the incredible team at Global NRG Advisory to bring you something that has been missing from this industry for far too long: a dedicated Project Finance Masterclass for biogas and biomethane professionals.

How do you actually fund a biogas project? That’s exactly what Chris Negus and Andrew Rice are breaking down across six live, expert-led modules, starting in September.

Cohorts are capped at just 15 seats. As a We Are Biogas subscriber, you have access to an exclusive 5% discount — use code WEAREBIO at checkout!

This is the kind of practical knowledge the industry actually needs. I couldn’t be more thrilled to share it with you.

👉 DM Chris Negus to get the details and secure your discounted seat! Let them know we sent you.

We Are Biogas is a curated weekly newsletter covering the global biogas, biomethane, RNG, and anaerobic digestion landscape.

Want to be featured? Email: alexandra@wearebiogas.com

Somewhere in rural Serbia, a village is getting smaller. The young people left first, then the school closed, then the small shops, then the sense that there was anything left worth staying for. It’s a pattern repeating across Central and Eastern Europe, quiet and persistent and almost entirely ignored in conversations about the energy transition. Lidija Zelić thinks about that village a lot. She thinks about the women holding it together, doing the farming, raising the children, carrying the weight of a community while their economic contribution goes unrecognized and their names don’t appear on the contracts. She thinks about what it would take to give that village a reason to believe in its own future. And she thinks about biogas.

That framing, biogas as a rural lifeline rather than an energy technology, didn’t come from an engineering textbook or an energy policy paper. It came from wine. Lidija spent years in Serbia’s wine industry, out in the field with producers, in wineries and rural communities, building trust and visibility for a sector the wider world barely knew existed. She learned that behind the glamorous image of wine is hard physical work, seasonal uncertainty, a deep connection to land, and the same slow, unglamorous process of building institutional credibility that she would later recognize when she stepped into biogas. She carries that experience everywhere. She still keeps field clothes and boots in the trunk of her car, because on any given day, she might go directly from a ministry meeting to a farm site visit, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Today, Lidija heads the Serbian Biogas Association, the organization driving sector development, regulatory engagement, international collaboration, and public communication for a market that has been building quietly for more than 16 years. Forty-five biogas plants operate at full capacity in Serbia. Another 55 projects hold temporary privileged producer status. The country is entering its first serious conversation about biomethane injection. None of that happened quickly, and none of it happened without the kind of field-level, community-rooted work that Lidija describes with the same seriousness she brings to a Brussels policy roundtable. The energy numbers matter. But in her telling, they’ve never been the whole story.

A Sector Built on Enthusiasm, Not Ideal Conditions

Serbia’s biogas market has characteristics that distinguish it from most European peers. The sector developed almost entirely from agriculture rather than from municipal waste or urban systems. Most existing plants are large-scale, typically around 1 MW, deeply connected to livestock farming and large agricultural operations. More than 65% of Serbia’s territory is agricultural land, and the biogas sector grew from that land organically, shaped by the resources and realities of farming communities rather than top-down industrial planning.

That agricultural identity has advantages and complications. The advantage is that the sector arrived with a natural constituency: farmers who understood organic inputs, who saw the circular logic of turning manure and agricultural residue into energy and returning nutrients to the soil, and who had existing relationships with the land that made the idea of a biogas plant feel less foreign than it might in a purely urban context. The complication is that Serbia has been developing its market, its regulatory framework, its institutional capacity, and its public understanding of the energy transition simultaneously, without the decades of accumulated policy infrastructure that older European markets could draw on.

That description, patient, persistent, proof-oriented, is also an accurate account of Lidija’s own approach to building the association. What she emphasizes most consistently about the Serbian sector’s development isn’t the technical progress or the regulatory milestones. It’s the people who stayed when progress was slow, who kept building when the conditions were against them, who understood that the sector’s credibility was being constructed one plant, one community, one honest conversation at a time.

The Communication Insight That Changes Everything

There’s a moment Lidija describes that any practitioner in an emerging energy market will recognize. A project is well-prepared technically, the engineering is sound, the numbers work, and yet development stalls. The technology didn’t fail. The community around it was never genuinely included in the conversation. The regulatory environment is hostile because no one built the relationships that would have made it friendly. The public perception is negative because no one explained the process in language people could engage with.

Lidija came to communication not as a strategic add-on but as a professional necessity. Without a technical background, she had to learn to explain complex biological and chemical processes to farmers, to local councils, to students, to ministries, and to journalists, all of whom needed different framings of the same underlying reality. That learning curve, initially a source of anxiety, became the most transferable skill she developed.

That framing, trust as infrastructure rather than optics, runs through everything she says about project development. The communities that initially resisted biogas plants in Serbia weren’t irrational. They were cautious about something unfamiliar, in an environment where they’d had limited experience with technical projects being developed transparently and with genuine regard for local concerns. The first reactions were almost always about fear: odors, pollution, safety, exclusion from decisions that would affect their everyday lives. What changed perception wasn’t a communications campaign. It was years of stable operation, visible community presence, and the accumulated evidence that the feared outcomes didn’t materialize.

One of the most practically useful observations in the interview concerns the asymmetry between how trust is built and how it’s lost. Lidija is direct about it.

For anyone planning a biogas project in a community with little prior exposure to the technology, that asymmetry is the most important planning input. The first projects in an emerging market don’t just represent themselves. They represent the entire sector for years afterward. The standard they set, positive or negative, becomes the reference point through which every subsequent project is evaluated. Getting the first projects right isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a structural necessity.

What Showing Up Actually Means

The image of field clothes and boots in the trunk isn’t incidental. It’s the physical expression of a philosophy about what it means to work in a sector that exists in the real world rather than on a slide deck.

That phrase, where the sector breathes, is about something specific and important. The gap between how a sector describes itself and how it actually functions on the ground is one of the most consistent sources of credibility problems in emerging energy markets. Communities develop a distrust not only of specific projects but of entire industries when they sense that the people speaking publicly about a technology have little real familiarity with what it looks like, smells like, and requires on a daily operational basis. Lidija’s credibility with communities, with farmers, and with operators comes partly from the fact that she’s seen the inside of the plants, had the difficult conversations, and been present when things were complicated rather than only when they were photogenic.

She applies the same standard to the advice she gives organizations struggling with community resistance. The instinct is usually to prepare better technical presentations, to organize more comprehensive information days, to communicate more volume. Her advice runs in a different direction: be present before the project is a source of conflict. Understand what people are actually concerned about rather than what you assumed they would be concerned about. Show up when there’s no camera, no formal meeting, and no easy conversation. That’s where trust is either built or lost.

Serbia’s Biomethane Moment and What It Requires

For the first time, Lidija says, biomethane in Serbia doesn’t feel like a subject being discussed in the future tense. The regulatory conversations are real. Institutional engagement is more substantive than it’s been at any previous point. Investors and international partners are paying attention. The global energy crisis, concerns about supply security, and the European context of renewable gas development have collectively shifted the way biomethane is perceived by policymakers who would previously have treated it as a niche sector interest.

That shift matters, and so does the existing foundation it’s building on. Serbia has 45 operational plants, experienced operators, a strong agricultural base, and people who’ve spent years developing sector knowledge under genuinely difficult conditions. The path to biomethane isn’t starting from zero. It’s starting from a market that has been maturing for 16 years and now has the opportunity to connect what it’s built domestically with a much larger European renewable gas story.

What still needs to happen is substantive. Clear, stable, long-term, predictable regulatory frameworks are the prerequisite for serious investment decisions in a sector requiring substantial capital and multi-decade market certainty. Secondary legislation enabling biomethane production, certification, and grid injection needs to be finalized and adopted. Market mechanisms and support schemes need to be designed carefully, drawing on the European experience that shows how easy it is to design incentives that produce the wrong assets at the wrong scale. And infrastructure, technical standards, and sectoral integration between energy, agriculture, and gas networks are all necessary preconditions that require coordination across government departments that don’t naturally work in sync.

None of that is a reason for pessimism. It’s a description of the work. And Serbia has shown, across 16 years of market development under conditions that were rarely cooperative, that it can do the work.

The Rural Dimension Nobody Talks About Enough

Lidija consistently resists the framing of biogas as purely an energy story, and the resistance is most evident when she talks about rural communities. Serbia faces a rural depopulation challenge that’s familiar across Central and Eastern Europe: young people leaving villages for cities or abroad, reducing local agricultural capacity, hollowing out communities that lose their schools, businesses, and social life in the process. Biogas doesn’t solve that problem on its own, but it can become part of a story about why a village has a future rather than only a past.

The economic argument is concrete. Additional income streams for farmers, agricultural modernization, local employment in plant operations, the value of nutrient-rich digestate for soil management, and the possibility of energy systems that serve local needs rather than solely feeding into a national grid represent real tangible benefits for communities that have spent years watching their economic base erode. But the less measurable benefit, the sense that a community is part of something forward-looking rather than simply managing decline, matters as much or more for the question of whether young people stay.

Her observations about women in rural communities carry particular weight. The economic contribution of women to Serbian agricultural households is enormous and systematically underrecognized. They carry a large share of operational responsibility, decision-making in daily farming practice, and the social fabric of village life, while their formal economic participation and visibility remain limited. Lidija sees the biogas and biomethane sector as a space where that changes, not through a single policy mechanism, but through the accumulation of economic opportunities, cooperative ownership structures, and the gradual recognition that rural women are development actors rather than passive beneficiaries.

She also points to digestate as an underattended dimension of the sector’s contribution to rural economies. Digestate, the nutrient-dense co-product of anaerobic digestion, is the most tangible expression of the circular economy argument for biogas: organic waste returns to the land as a resource that improves soil health, reduces synthetic fertilizer costs, and builds long-term agricultural resilience. In agricultural countries, that argument has more practical resonance than the energy production numbers. It connects to what farmers already understand about land stewardship and what they’re already worried about in terms of input costs and soil quality.

The Generation Coming Through

One of the more optimistic threads in Lidija’s account concerns young people and students. The Serbian Biogas Association works actively with universities, not only technical faculties but economics, business, management, and sustainability programs, reflecting her conviction that the sector’s growth will create demand for professionals from a far wider range of backgrounds than it currently draws on. That outreach is both practical and genuinely energizing for her.

What she observes in the students she speaks with is a generation that’s more naturally aligned with the ideas behind biogas, sustainability, circular economy, local resource development, than previous generations were when the sector was beginning. They’re entering an industry that’s still in an intensive development phase in Serbia, which means they’re not stepping into a fully formed system with rigid roles and defined pathways. They’re entering at a moment when the sector itself is being shaped, and where the contribution of early-career professionals will be visible in how the market develops over the coming decade.

That vision, biogas as rural transformation rather than energy technology, is the organizing idea behind everything Lidija Zelić has built in Serbia over the past eight years. The plants are real, the regulatory progress is real, and the biomethane moment is real. But what she’s actually been building, through years of field visits, university lectures, difficult community conversations, and the slow work of institutional trust, is something harder to quantify and more important: a sector that people believe in, and a story about rural Serbia that has a future in it.

The boots are still in the trunk. That’s not incidental. That’s the whole approach.

About the Serbian Biogas Association

The Serbian Biogas Association is the leading industry body representing the biogas and biomethane sector in Serbia. It works across regulatory development, public communication, international collaboration, and sector education to advance the country’s renewable gas market.
www.biogassrbija.rs

Get in Touch

To learn more about the Serbian biogas sector, explore collaboration opportunities, or connect with Lidija directly, reach out at: lidija.zelic@biogas.org.rs

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners drops a €1.7 billion bioenergy fund with a €200 million European Investment Fund anchor. Nature Sustainability publishes a methane leakage study with findings that every wastewater biogas operator needs to read — and not all of them are going to like it. Ireland signs its seventh biomethane grid connection in three years. The Netherlands stacks €150 million in long-term operating subsidies behind a single waste-wood-to-biomethane project. And Budweiser installs a biogas recovery system at its Lancashire brewery and cuts gas consumption by up to 8%.

The break is cancelled. Let’s go.

In this episode, we cover:

• Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners launches Advanced Bioenergy Fund II targeting €1.5 billion — anchored by a €200 million European Investment Fund commitment backed by InvestEU and REPowerEU

• South Carolina signs a landfill gas-to-RNG tax credit into law as US federal policy uncertainty pushes biogas support further toward state-level architecture

• Stream BioEnergy signs its seventh biomethane grid connection in three years — this time an €80 million food and garden waste plant in Little Island, Co. Cork

• The Netherlands’ EemsGas project secures €149.8 million in SDE++ operating subsidies covering 15 years of production — the kind of long-term revenue certainty most markets still can’t offer

• ReFuels breaks ground on a new UK biomethane refuelling station on the M4 corridor, targeting 800 trucks a day and forming a dedicated low-carbon freight corridor with its Magor site in South Wales

• Oklahoma State University signs a 10-year RNG partnership with Love’s Alternative Energy to power its 27-bus campus transit fleet — a demand-side story the sector doesn’t tell often enough

• SUEZ breaks ground on a new 50,000 tpa anaerobic digestion plant in Northumberland, explicitly connected to England’s mandatory food waste collection mandate that came into force in April 2026

• Nature Sustainability publishes a US national-scale assessment finding methane leakage rates ranging from 0.4% to 65% at wastewater biogas facilities — with a large fraction of current systems potentially exceeding the net-zero emission threshold

• Budweiser’s Samlesbury brewery cuts gas consumption by up to 8% after installing a biogas recovery system that captures energy from its own wastewater treatment process

• Italy’s Malya concept vehicle integrates a biomethane range extender into a compact urban EV — positioning biomethane as a solution for range anxiety, not just heavy transport

• Ukraine’s Poroshenko-linked agricultural group files plans for a 200,000 tpa biomethane complex in Vinnytsia Oblast, as Ukrainian producers begin shipping gas to Germany

• McDonald’s confirms anaerobic digestion is part of how it keeps edible food waste below 1% — and what that gap between US and UK operations tells us about policy-driven feedstock behaviour

• India’s REnergy Dynamics wins two compressed biogas contracts from Refex Renewables as India’s CBG value chain begins to specialise into distinct roles

Exclusive: Alexandra reads through this month’s We Are Biogas essay — The Gap Is the Story: What May 2026 Told Us About Where Biogas Is Today. Four gaps. Four places where the distance between what biogas can do and what the conditions currently allow is most visible. And in each case, someone is closing one. The floor-building phase isn’t over. It’s just become more precise about which section needs laying next.

“The sector is waiting for itself to close the implementation distance.”

If you work in renewable gas, waste management, project finance, infrastructure investment, circular economy, agricultural energy, or climate policy — this episode covers a lot of ground and doesn’t let you look away.

📩 We Are Biogas subscribers get an exclusive 5% discount on the NRG Global Advisory Project Finance Masterclass — six live modules on how you actually fund a biogas project. September cohort, 15 seats, and they are going fast. Use code WEAREBIO at checkout or DM Chris Negus directly and tell him We Are Biogas sent you.

We Are Biogas is your weekly breakdown of biogas, biomethane, RNG & anaerobic digestion — from farms and wastewater plants to the policy rooms and capital markets where this industry is being built. New episodes every week. Subscribe to the newsletter at wearebiogas.substack.com

🌍 Explore more stories, insights, and media from across the global biogas industry:

https://wearebiogas.com

📩 Want your story told, or have a topic you want us to cover next?
Reach out directly: alexandra@wearebiogas.com

🔗 Let’s connect and keep the conversation going:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrarng/

Want to be featured? Email me.

5% Discount For We Are Biogas Subscribers!

I’ve teamed up with the incredible team at Global NRG Advisory to bring you something that has been missing from this industry for far too long: a dedicated Project Finance Masterclass for biogas and biomethane professionals.

How do you actually fund a biogas project? That’s exactly what Chris Negus and Andrew Rice are breaking down across six live, expert-led modules, starting in September.

Cohorts are capped at just 15 seats. As a We Are Biogas subscriber, you have access to an exclusive 5% discount — use code WEAREBIO at checkout!

This is the kind of practical knowledge the industry actually needs. I couldn’t be more thrilled to share it with you.

👉 DM Chris Negus to get the details and secure your discounted seat! Let them know we sent you.

We Are Biogas Exclusive

The Gap Is the Story: What May 2026 Told Us About Where Biogas Is Today

By Alexandra Arndt · June 1

What is actually in the way? Not in the abstract, not as a rhetorical device, but as a precise, practical diagnosis. The distance between what biogas could be and what it currently is remains stubbornly, frustratingly wide. This month, that distance had a shape. Four distinct gaps, each showing up in different places, each requiring a different kind of attention. What’s striking — and genuinely encouraging — is that in each case, someone, somewhere, was closing one. From Kevin Gross’s front-end engineering methodology to Ben Martin’s forensic account of Ireland’s regulatory dysfunction, from India’s long-overdue grid injection guidelines to Egypt’s first wastewater-to-biogas retrofit, from the mandatory food waste collection rollout in England to the consolidation of RNG assets under institutional capital in the US and Europe, every thread builds a story about a gap being named, or a gap being closed. The floor-building, as we’ve defined previously, is the current phase of our industry, and it hasn’t stopped. It’s just become more specific about which section of the floor needs laying next.

Read the Article

Policy & Capital

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners Launches a €1.7 Billion Bioenergy Fund With €200 Million From the European Investment Fund Behind It

🌍 Europe | World Bio Market Insights

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) has launched its Advanced Bioenergy Fund II (ABF II), targeting €1.5 billion to finance large-scale biomethane and bioenergy projects across Europe, including Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Belgium, and Finland. The fund has received a €200 million anchor commitment from the European Investment Fund, backed by EU initiatives including InvestEU and REPowerEU. CIP’s focus will be on greenfield projects in supportive regulatory markets, investing primarily in industrial-scale biogas plants using anaerobic digestion to convert agricultural waste, manure, and other organic feedstocks into biomethane. CIP’s partner heading the advanced bioenergy team described the EIF commitment as a key milestone toward the fund’s €1.5 billion target and evidence of strong market demand for domestic biomethane. With over €37 billion raised and operations across more than 30 countries, CIP’s involvement signals that biomethane has cleared a threshold.

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South Carolina Signs a Landfill Gas-to-RNG Tax Credit Into Law As US State-Level Policy Momentum Builds

🇺🇸 United States | Biomass Magazine

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed legislation on May 19 creating a new state income tax credit specifically supporting the development of landfill gas-to-renewable natural gas projects within the state. It is a targeted, state-level policy instrument designed to de-risk a project type that has significant potential in a state with an active landfill estate. The broader context matters: as federal policy around 45Q, 45Z, and the Inflation Reduction Act remains in flux, state-level tax credit mechanisms are becoming increasingly important load-bearing elements in US biogas project finance. South Carolina's move joins Hawaii's Clean Fuel Standard and Oregon's existing LCFS framework as evidence that US biogas support is increasingly being built through state-by-state policy architecture rather than a unified federal framework. That fragmentation is a challenge. It is also, in the current environment, the system that is functioning.

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Ireland's €80 Million Cork Biomethane Plant Signs Grid Connection Agreement, Its Seventh in Three Years

🇮🇪 Ireland | The Avondhu Press

Gas Networks Ireland has signed an agreement with Stream BioEnergy to connect a new €80 million biomethane facility in Little Island, Co. Cork, to the national gas network. Currently under construction, the plant is expected to become operational in 2027, processing approximately 90,000 tonnes of domestic and commercial food and garden waste annually using anaerobic digestion to produce 80 GWh of renewable biomethane, enough to meet the annual heating demand of approximately 6,000 homes. It will be Ireland's largest biomethane plant using mixed food and garden waste, and represents Stream BioEnergy's seventh biomethane production plant contracted to connect to the national gas grid in the last three years. That last number is the one to hold onto. Seven contracts in three years is a real pipeline. The regulatory environment Ben Martin described in his exclusive with us last week, fragmented, siloed, digestate-constrained, is clearly not stopping every project. It is raising the cost and the difficulty of each one. The plants that are getting through are the ones with the right feedstock strategy, the right advisors, and enough runway to absorb the friction.

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The Netherlands' EemsGas Project Secures €149.8 Million in Long-Term Operating Subsidy for Waste-Wood-to-Biomethane Production

🇳🇱 Netherlands | Renewables Now / Gasunie

The EemsGas project: a 50/50 joint venture between Perpetual Next and Gasunie, being developed at the Chemical Park in Delfzijl, has received an SDE++ operating subsidy from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency worth €149.8 million, covering the production phase from July 2029 to June 2044. Combined with a €30 million DEI+ investment subsidy already secured, EemsGas now has stacked government support across both construction and operation for what is expected to become one of the Netherlands' largest biomethane production facilities. The plant will use advanced gasification technology developed with TNO to convert waste wood into approximately 18 million cubic metres of green gas annually, with construction targeted to begin in 2027. The SDE++ mechanism is exactly what the sector consistently identifies as the missing piece in most markets: guaranteed minimum income for the operating phase, removing the revenue risk that makes long-duration project debt structuring so difficult. The Netherlands has built a mechanism that does that. The EemsGas deal is proof that it works.

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Project Spotlights

ReFuels Breaks Ground on a New UK Biomethane Refuelling Station on the M4 Corridor, Capable of Serving 800 Trucks a Day

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | FleetPoint

ReFuels N.V. has begun construction of a new public-access biomethane refuelling station in Swindon, strategically positioned with direct access to the M4 motorway to serve freight operators moving between London, Wales, and the Midlands. The station will be owned and operated by CNG Fuels, in which ReFuels holds a 40% stake, and is expected to be completed in Q1 2027. Once operational, it will be capable of refuelling up to 12 HGVs simultaneously and supporting more than 800 trucks per day, with annual dispensing capacity exceeding 30 million kilograms of 100% renewable Bio-CNG. It sits alongside a second station currently under construction in Magor, South Wales, together forming a dedicated low-carbon freight corridor along one of the UK's busiest logistics routes. ReFuels' CEO cited growing demand from fleet operators adopting the new generation of larger 6×2 gas trucks, which unlock a significantly larger addressable market. Bio-CNG produced from food waste and manure reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 85 to 90% compared with diesel, while offering fuel costs approximately 25% lower than diesel and 40% cheaper than HVO.

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Oklahoma State University Signs a 10-Year RNG Partnership With Love's Alternative Energy to Power Its Campus Transit Fleet

🇺🇸 United States | Oklahoma State University

Oklahoma State University has announced a new 10-year partnership with Love's Alternative Energy, a division of Love's Travel Stops, for the operation, maintenance, and renewable fuel supply of OSU's compressed natural gas bus fuelling station. The contract, effective May 28, covers OSU's fleet of 27 transit buses serving both the Stillwater campus and the surrounding community. Love's will replace aging compressor equipment and assume full operational and maintenance responsibility. OSU has used CNG for its transit fleet since 2009, and the new agreement transitions that supply toward renewable natural gas. It's a story about institutional demand, a university, not a logistics company, locking in a 10-year RNG supply commitment for public transportation. The demand side of the RNG market is broader than it looks. Universities, municipalities, transit authorities: these are the kinds of long-duration offtake relationships that anchor project finance for upstream RNG developers.

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SUEZ Breaks Ground on a New 50,000 tpa AD Plant in Northumberland as England's Mandatory Food Waste Collection Takes Effect

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | SUEZ

SUEZ has begun construction on a new anaerobic digestion plant near Ellington in Northumberland, designed to process up to 50,000 tonnes of food waste annually, producing both a recycled fertiliser product and enough green gas for around 5,500 homes. The plant is expected to be operational by the end of 2027. The announcement forms part of a broader UK commercial update from SUEZ that also includes a £396 million, 10-year contract extension with Milton Keynes City Council and a new lithium battery recycling plant. SUEZ's CEO connected all of these developments explicitly to England's mandatory food waste collection rollout, which came into force in April 2026. The timing is not incidental. Every new household food waste collection service generates a new feedstock stream that needs somewhere to go. SUEZ is building where that stream will flow. The policy creates the feedstock. The feedstock justifies the capital. The capital builds the plant.

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Tech, Science & Innovation

Nature Sustainability: A Large Fraction of Current Wastewater Biogas Systems May Be Emitting More Methane Than They're Capturing

🌍 Global | Nature Sustainability

A new study published in Nature Sustainability presents a US national-scale assessment of methane leakage thresholds for wastewater biogas recovery systems, and the findings are significant. Compiling measured leakage data from over 50 facilities and the full available literature, researchers found leakage rates ranging from 0.4% to 65%, with a large fraction of current systems exceeding the net-zero emission threshold. Net-zero thresholds ranged from 2% to 10% of biogas produced, depending on heat recovery, grid emissions intensity, and the biogas utilisation pathway. The implication is uncomfortable but important: some operating biogas recovery systems may be delivering climate disbenefits rather than benefits, and the variance is wide enough to make blanket claims about wastewater biogas being net-positive unreliable without facility-specific measurement. For the sector, this is not an argument against wastewater biogas recovery; it is an argument for measurement, transparency, and operational rigour in methane management. The full climate case for biogas, as Ben Martin argued in the We Are Biogas exclusive article “Every Position Has to Perform”, depends on counting the methane correctly. That means counting what escapes as well as what gets captured.

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Budweiser's Samlesbury Brewery Cuts Gas Consumption by Up to 8% With a New On-Site Biogas Recovery System

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Gasworld

Industrial wastewater treatment firm Global Water & Energy, a subsidiary of Ekopak, has completed the installation of a biogas recovery system at Budweiser Brewing Group's Samlesbury brewery in Lancashire. As part of the on-site water treatment process, organic material from the brewing process is broken down, producing biogas as a by-product. That biogas is now reinjected into the brewery's energy system as renewable heat. The result: a 5 to 8% reduction in gas consumption and lower Scope 1 CO₂ emissions. The brewery has operated since 1972, employs around 500 people, and received a £45 million investment from AB InBev in 2021. This is another version of the retrofit story. The biogas was always being produced by the wastewater treatment process. The decision to capture it rather than flare or vent it is a capital allocation decision, and an increasingly common one as large food and beverage manufacturers face Scope 1 pressure. Brewing, distilling, food processing: the organic load in industrial wastewater is a standing biogas resource. Most of it is still going uncaptured.

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Italian EV Concept Integrates a Biomethane Range Extender, A Preview of What Hybrid Fuel Architecture Could Look Like

🇮🇹 Italy | Tarantas News

Italian designer Umberto Palermo, in collaboration with Federmetano and engineering firm Reinova, has unveiled the Malya concept, a compact urban electric vehicle under four metres in length, designed to seat five passengers, and built around a biomethane range extender. The small internal combustion engine in the Malya does not drive the wheels directly; instead, it acts as a generator to recharge the battery while driving, specifically intended to reduce range anxiety and charging infrastructure dependence in urban environments. The developers point to Italy's already well-developed network of compressed and liquefied natural gas stations, noting that fully renewable biomethane is also compatible. Production is envisioned through the nanofactory model, small, flexible manufacturing sites that don't require large stamping facilities. Exact specifications and a launch timeline have not yet been disclosed. The Malya is notable not as a production vehicle but as a framing device: it positions biomethane not as a heavy transport fuel but as a range-extension solution for urban EVs, opening a demand pathway in a segment the sector rarely addresses.

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Expansion & Trends

Ukraine's Poroshenko-Linked Agricultural Group Files Plans for a 200,000 tpa Biomethane Complex in Vinnytsia

🇺🇦 Ukraine | New Voice of Ukraine

UPI-Energy, a company linked to the family of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and part of the Ukrprominvest-Agro agricultural group, has launched public consultations in Vinnytsia Oblast for a planned biomethane and electricity production complex. The facility will process up to 200,000 tonnes of organic waste annually, primarily cattle manure, sugar beet pulp, and beet tops and tails from the group's own agricultural and sugar operations, producing up to 13 million cubic metres of biogas per year at a capacity of up to 1,500 Nm³ per hour. The project is being evaluated for biomethane upgrading via either membrane separation or amine scrubbing. UPI-Energy is not entering this market alone. Multiple Ukrainian producers are already shipping biomethane to Germany, and Ukraine's parliament has passed legislation enabling biomethane exports to Europe. The Ukrainian Bioenergy Association estimates the country could produce over 20 billion cubic metres of biomethane annually, potentially 20% of European market supply. A large agricultural holding with captive manure and sugar processing waste is exactly the kind of vertically integrated feedstock anchor that makes biomethane projects bankable. Watch this one develop.

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McDonald's Sends Less Than 1% of Its Edible Food to Waste, And Anaerobic Digestion Is Part of How It Gets There

🍔 United States / Global | Mi Bolsillo

McDonald's has confirmed that anaerobic digestion forms part of its food waste management framework, with items that cannot be donated sent to composting stations and AD facilities for rendering and energy recovery. The company states it yields less than 1% of waste from its edible food stock through a combination of donation partnerships, including Feeding America, Food Donation Connection, and the Global FoodBanking Network, and downstream processing. It is worth noting that individual franchise practices vary significantly, and the company's approach differs meaningfully between markets, particularly between the UK and US, where policy environments for food waste diversion are different. Still, the signal is the same one that keeps appearing across this newsletter: large food service operators are increasingly treating AD not as a compliance option but as a standard component of food waste infrastructure. As mandatory diversion requirements expand, that normalisation accelerates. The demand for AD capacity is, in part, a function of how many McDonald's, Krispy Kremes, and rail operators are being held to a diversion standard.

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India's REnergy Dynamics Wins Two Compressed Biogas Projects From Refex Renewables As Private Sector CBG Dealmaking Accelerates

🇮🇳 India | Bioenergy Times

REnergy Dynamics has secured two waste-to-compressed biogas projects from Refex Renewables, covering project development, engineering, commissioning, feedstock management, anaerobic digestion, gas upgrading and compression, and fuel offtake arrangements. The projects will convert municipal and organic waste into CBG for transport and industrial applications. REnergy Dynamics said it plans to use the contracts to expand its pipeline, strengthen partnerships in the renewable energy sector, and increase deployment of waste-to-CBG facilities across different supply chains. India's CBG sector has been in a sustained build-out phase following the PNGRB's grid injection guidelines and the government's SATAT scheme, which targets 5,000 CBG plants nationwide. What is notable in this story is the structure: a technology and project development company winning supply contracts from a renewables aggregator. The value chain is specialising. Feedstock managers, digestion operators, gas upgraders, and fuel distributors are beginning to function as distinct roles rather than vertically integrated functions within a single project. That specialisation is how sectors mature.

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We Are Biogas is a curated weekly newsletter covering the global biogas, biomethane, RNG, and anaerobic digestion landscape.

Want to be featured? Email: alexandra@wearebiogas.com

What is actually in the way? Not in the abstract, not as a rhetorical device, but as a precise, practical diagnosis. The distance between what biogas could be and what it currently is remains stubbornly, frustratingly wide. This month, that distance had a shape. Four distinct gaps, each showing up in different places, each requiring a different kind of attention. What’s striking, and genuinely encouraging, is that in each case, someone, somewhere, was closing one. The floor-building, as we’ve defined previously, is the current phase of our industry, and it hasn’t stopped. It’s just become more specific about which section of the floor needs laying next.

From Kevin Gross’s front-end engineering methodology to Ben Martin’s forensic account of Ireland’s regulatory dysfunction, from India’s long-overdue grid injection guidelines to Egypt’s first wastewater-to-biogas retrofit, from the mandatory food waste collection rollout in England to the consolidation of RNG assets under institutional capital in the US and Europe, every thread builds a story about a gap being named, or a gap being closed. Not the same gap every time. But always a gap between what biogas can do, and the conditions that would allow it to do it at scale.

If you take one thing from this month, it should be this: the sector is waiting for itself to close the implementation distance.

Gap One: The Front End

Kevin Gross, founder of Gross & Co., puts the scale of the US biogas opportunity in terms that should make any investor sit up. Roughly 2,600 operating biogas systems currently exist in the United States. The American Biogas Council puts the potential at 17,000. That is nearly 15,000 projects that could exist, for which the feedstocks can support, and in many cases, the offtake market is ready, and yet they don’t get built.

The reason isn’t what most people assume. In Kevin’s interpretation, it’s something more specific and more fixable: the development phase. The work that precedes financing is too slow, too expensive, and too often built on assumptions that haven’t been stress-tested against reality. When an engineer hands a developer a concept-level estimate built on defaults rather than site-specific data, the project walks into its first investor conversation already carrying structural uncertainty. The conversation stalls. The project dies in the churn.

Kevin’s response is what he calls an assumptions-first methodology: log every unknown, bound it, show what it does to the cost and performance envelope, and run engineering disciplines in parallel rather than handing work off sequentially. The result is a Class 2 estimate in roughly six weeks, approximately 85% faster than the industry norm. The insight behind it is deceptively simple: investors don’t need false certainty. They need a credible decision framework. Name the unknowns, bound them, and the conversation gets better.

That lesson doesn’t stay inside the US border. Hungary has announced ambitions for 20 to 25 new biomethane plants. Latvia’s grid injection programme was oversubscribed well beyond its initial allocation. Lithuania’s first two months of 2026 saw guarantees of origin issued at 2.4 times the rate of the same period last year. In every one of these markets, the gap between stated ambition and built capacity comes back to the same problem: pre-development rigour. The $450 billion industrial frontier Kevin describes will not be unlocked by better science alone. It will be unlocked by better front-end definition, applied consistently, at thousands of sites that currently stall before they ever reach a financier’s desk.

Gap Two: The Living System

Ben Martin of Redrock Bioenergy gives the implementation problem its sharpest framing, not in pre-construction, but inside the operating plant. His account of diagnosing a plant in turmoil is worth sitting with. Not because the technical specifics are unfamiliar to practitioners, but because of what the pattern of failure reveals about a sector-wide error of philosophy.

Anaerobic digestion is a living system. The four-stage biological cascade, hydrolysis, acidogenesis, acetogenesis, and methanogenesis, is carried out by distinct microbial communities in dynamic equilibrium. The methanogenic archaea at the end of the chain, the organisms producing the gas the plant exists to capture, are among the most chemically sensitive organisms in commercial industrial use. They respond to ammonia accumulation, trace element depletion, C:N imbalance, and hydraulic shear. Interrupt one stage without accounting for the downstream effects, and the resulting failure is non-linear, rapid, and expensive to reverse.

Martin’s diagnosis of where plants consistently go wrong is blunt. Most anaerobic digestion facilities are staffed as if the engineering is the asset and the biology is a given. The mechanical logic dominates. The biological logic gets treated as a secondary variable. And the suffering that follows, slow, compounding, difficult to trace, is, in most cases, entirely preventable.

The feedstock optimisation insight he walks through makes this concrete. Moving from 200,000 to 250,000 tonnes per annum by adding maize silage and ryegrass cover-crop alongside food-organics produced a 100% increase in methane output from a 25% increase in feedstock volume. The mechanism isn’t mysterious once you understand it: food waste runs high on moisture and low on carbon relative to nitrogen, which drives ammonia accumulation and methanogen inhibition. Maize silage runs at a C:N ratio that balances the digester’s working chemistry back toward stability. The biology runs healthier, volatile solids destruction improves, and gas yield per kilogram of fed material rises. The insight isn’t to add volume, it’s to understand what the microbial community actually requires, and design feeding strategy around that rather than around gate fees.

Treat feedstock as the primary design variable. Treat the biology as the team. Every position performs, or the whole thing underdelivers. That discipline, applied consistently across an industry that has too often inverted those priorities, closes a gap that no amount of capital or policy can substitute for.

Gap Three: The Architecture

Ireland is the clearest case study this month of what happens when policy framework and operational reality fail to speak to each other. The numbers are stark: a 5.7 TWh by 2030 biomethane target, two operational injection facilities producing around 75 GWh, and a commissioning rate that would need to reach approximately one new plant every ten days from now until 2030, in a country that commissioned two AD plants in an entire decade.

The easy diagnosis points to the Route to Market: the Renewable Heat Obligation delay, planning inconsistency, and grid economics. The structural problem runs deeper. Anaerobic digestion in Ireland sits across at least four government departments, none of which owns it, none of which operates on a common timeline, and none of which has delivered the integrated digestate land-bank framework that gives any project its commercial anchor. Planning doesn’t factor in feedstock catchment logic. The EPA hasn’t published end-of-waste criteria for digestate. The RHO didn’t account for RENURE timelines. Each department’s logic is internally coherent. Together, they are a gridlock.

The European Commission added a further complication: after ruling Ireland’s domestic biomethane multiplier incompatible with single market rules, it turned the same scrutiny toward France’s support framework. The pattern is now established. Support architectures built on domestic preference are precisely the ones the Commission will flag. Every member state designing biomethane policy in 2026 is now operating with explicit knowledge of that enforcement posture; the compliance gap between national ambition and EU single market rules has become the primary policy risk in European biomethane deployment.

India offered a useful counterpoint. The PNGRB’s approval of comprehensive grid injection guidelines for compressed biogas, quality specifications, safety instrumentation, metering standards, and grid access protocols is a textbook illustration of what architectural clarity does to a market. The pathway from production to end market is now defined. Brazil, by contrast, has over 1,800 biogas plants and strong production momentum, yet Fitch BMI identified underdeveloped pipeline infrastructure as the binding constraint on sector growth. The physical infrastructure layer is not a complement to policy ambition. It is the condition of it.

Gap Four: The Uncounted Ledger

The most important conversation of the month isn’t about a project, a policy, or a technology. It’s about an argument the industry consistently fails to make, and what that costs it.

The biogas sector presents itself, almost universally, as a renewable energy substitution story. The methane injected into the grid displaces fossil gas at the burner tip. That benefit is counted, priced, and supported. A second ledger goes almost entirely unacknowledged: the methane that would otherwise have entered the atmosphere from the alternative disposal pathways, landfill, manure lagoons, uncovered slurry stores, and aerobic decomposition of crop residues. Over a 20-year asset life, with methane carrying roughly 80 times the atmospheric warming potency of CO₂ on a near-term basis, the avoidance side of that ledger is frequently larger than the displacement side. Most reporting frameworks count one and ignore the other. Most support mechanisms price one and ignore the other.

The consequence of that accounting gap is structural. Biomethane gets priced as a renewable energy product when it is more precisely a methane-abatement infrastructure that produces energy as a co-product. That single reframe changes the policy logic, the carbon accounting, and the corporate offtake conversation simultaneously. A corporation managing a Scope 1 abatement commitment is buying avoided methane first; the gas molecule is attached to that abatement, not the other way around. Until the industry leads with the avoided-emissions argument, confidently, consistently, in policy submissions, offtake negotiations, and public planning consultations, the wrong levers keep getting pulled. Value keeps being left on the table.

The Floor Holds

Against all of that, the proof-of-concept stories this month matter, and there are more of them than the gap stories get credit for.

Welsh Water’s Wrexham facility processes sewage sludge from across North Wales and delivers biomethane directly into the National Grid, heating homes whose residents had no idea the system existed. Energy self-sufficient, circular, invisible in the best possible way, that is embedded infrastructure, not demonstration infrastructure. Cannock Chase District’s mandatory food waste rollout gathered over 95 tonnes in its first week from 44,000 households. Spain’s HAM Group completed the rollout of biomethane across its entire network of more than 140 refuelling stations, with existing gas vehicles requiring zero modification to use it. A biomethane-powered 74-tonne truck is running Brazil’s sugar export corridor on fuel made from the vinasse residue of the crop it carries, a closed-loop fuel cycle built out of what the industry was previously treating as a disposal problem. In Egypt, a retrofit agreement transformed an existing wastewater plant into a biogas energy asset without building a single new structure.

None of these are pilots. They are demonstrations that each of the four gaps described above can be closed, that biogas infrastructure, properly architected, properly operated, honestly accounted for, and sensibly regulated, delivers exactly what it promises. The floor that was being laid last month is holding weight.

The Takeaway

Last month’s question was whether the sector was ready to build the floor. May’s answer is more specific: the floor is structural, and its weakest point is whichever gap is being left unaddressed.

Fix the front-end engineering gap and more projects make it past pre-development into something a financier can evaluate. Fix the biological operating gap and more of those projects perform for 25 years rather than degrading quietly in year two. Fix the policy architecture gap and more markets convert stated ambition into commissioned capacity. Fix the carbon accounting gap and the full climate case finally gets made, the gas produced and the methane prevented, both on the ledger, both in the room.

None of those require a scientific breakthrough. All of them require the sector to hold a more precise picture of where it is actually stuck, and apply the right kind of rigour to each gap rather than assuming that momentum in one area compensates for stagnation in another.

The headlines this month are full of energy. The discipline is in figuring out which gap you’re standing in front of and building from there.

We Are Biogas is a curated weekly newsletter covering the global biogas, biomethane, RNG, and anaerobic digestion landscape.


Want to be featured? Email: alexandra@wearebiogas.com

We’re also watching the equipment supply chain consolidate in real time, institutional capital arriving in new markets, and England’s mandatory food waste collection rollout delivering 95 tonnes to anaerobic digestion in its first week.

In this episode, we cover:

• MOL Group brings Hungary’s third biomethane plant online at Szarvas — 7 million cubic metres of annual output, grid-injected, and a blueprint for Central and Eastern European expansion

• Lithuania restructures domestic biomethane pricing as the sector records 2.4x growth in guarantees of origin year-on-year and joins the European ERGaR cross-border certificate trading hub

• Burckhardt Compression acquires Fornovo Gas — a 57-year-old Italian biogas compressor specialist — signalling that the industrial supply chain is being priced in ahead of a scaling wave

• Greenlane Renewables and Panasonic do Brasil formalize local manufacturing of biogas upgrading technology, targeting Brazil’s forecast sevenfold output growth by 2035

• Egypt’s first PPP wastewater plant gets a biogas power generation unit — a retrofit model with implications for hundreds of flaring facilities across the African continent

• Brazil’s Biorrota project deploys a nine-axle, 74-tonne biomethane truck on the sugar route to the Port of Santos, fuelled by vinasse from the sugarcane ethanol process

• Seaweed-derived cobalt hydrochar boosts methane production from antibiotic-contaminated chicken manure by 25% while cutting resistance genes by 65% in a new study from Shenyang Agricultural University

• Spain’s Turn2X plant claims a European first — synthetic methane from green hydrogen and biogenic CO₂ injected directly into the gas distribution network

• Osaka Gas converts used bioplastic bento containers into biogas via anaerobic digestion, pointing toward sewage treatment facilities as multi-stream organic waste receivers

• Welsh Water’s Wrexham AD facility quietly heats homes across the region using biogas from sewage collected across all of North Wales — and most people had no idea

• 44,000 households in Cannock Chase recycle 95 tonnes of food waste in week one of England’s mandatory collection rollout — all of it going straight to anaerobic digestion

Exclusive: We Are Biogas sits down with Ben Martin, Founder and Director of Redrock Bioenergy, for a conversation that covers the living biology at the heart of every AD plant, the feedstock insight that doubled gas output from a 25% increase in volume, the structural dysfunction inside Ireland’s regulatory architecture, and — the part that changes everything — the methane the entire global industry isn’t counting. The emissions avoided from landfills, manure lagoons, and uncovered slurry stores that never appear in the support mechanisms, the carbon accounting, or the public case for biogas. Full article read-through included.

If you work in renewable gas, waste management, infrastructure investment, circular economy, agricultural energy, or climate policy — this one is for you.

📩 We Are Biogas subscribers have exclusive access to a 5% discount on the NRG Global Advisory Project Finance Masterclass. Six live modules on how you actually fund a biogas project. Cohorts are capped at 15 seats, and they are going fast. DM Chris Negus and tell him We Are Biogas sent you.

Want to be featured? Email me.

Exciting news for the We Are Biogas community!

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We Are Biogas Exclusive

Every Position Has to Perform: The Living Science, The Broken Policy & The Methane The Industry Isn't Counting

By Alexandra Arndt · May 18

In this week’s exclusive, Ben Martin takes us through the living biology at the heart of every AD plant, the feedstock insight that doubled gas output from a 25% increase in volume, and the structural dysfunction inside Ireland’s regulatory architecture that is quietly killing projects that should be getting built. But the sharpest part of the conversation is about the methane the industry isn’t counting, the emissions avoided from landfills, manure lagoons, and uncovered slurry stores that never get captured in the support mechanisms, the carbon accounting, or the public case for biogas. That number, he argues, changes everything. And the sector’s failure to lead with it means the wrong policy levers keep getting pulled and the wrong economic value keeps being left on the table.

Read the Article

Policy & Capital

MOL Group's First Biomethane Plant Is About to Come Online, and It's Only Hungary's Third

🇭🇺 Hungary | Renewables Now

MOL Group is expanding its Szarvas biogas plant, acquired from BayWa AG in 2023, with a new biomethane upgrading unit that will make it the company's first biomethane facility and only the third such plant in Hungary. Expected to be completed by the end of 2026, the unit will produce more than 7 million cubic metres of biomethane annually, equivalent to the annual gas consumption of approximately 8,500 households, and will be fed directly into Hungary's national gas network. The plant currently processes over 111,000 tonnes of organic waste annually, including meat industry residues, agricultural substrate, slurry, and manure, producing nearly 12 million cubic metres of biogas and 24 GWh of electricity per year. The biomethane unit will purify that gas to grid-injection quality and carry internationally recognised ISCC green certification. MOL's Vice President for New and Sustainable Businesses was candid about the conditions required: unlocking biomethane at a national scale in Hungary will need not just capital, but a coherent support system, clear regulation, and active cooperation between the agricultural and energy sectors. MOL says it intends to apply what it learns at Szarvas to evaluate further acquisitions and greenfield investments across Central and Eastern Europe.

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Lithuania Moves to Lower Domestic Biomethane Prices, and the Sector Is Already Accelerating Ahead of It

🇱🇹 Lithuania | InfoErdvė

Lithuania is taking regulatory steps to reduce domestic biomethane prices as part of a broader effort to deepen its local green energy market and reduce dependence on fossil gas imports. The move comes as the sector is already expanding rapidly: the country now has 12 operational biomethane plants with a combined capacity of 67 MW, and guarantees of origin issued in the first two months of 2026 were 2.4 times higher than the same period in 2025. Amber Grid, Lithuania's gas transmission operator, has also joined the European ERGaR Hub, enabling standardised cross-border certificate trading and opening Lithuanian producers to major green energy buyers, most notably Germany. The pricing intervention signals that Lithuania is moving beyond the build phase and into market architecture. The question is no longer whether biomethane can be produced here, but whether the commercial conditions can sustain it at scale.

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Burckhardt Compression Acquires a 57-Year-Old Italian Biogas Compressor Specialist, A Sign That the Equipment Supply Chain Is Being Priced In

🇨🇭🇮🇹 Switzerland / Italy | Gasworld

Swiss compression giant Burckhardt Compression has signed an agreement to acquire Fornovo Gas, an Italian manufacturer founded in 1969 and one of Europe's leading producers of mid-sized reciprocating compressors for biogas and CNG applications. The company employs approximately 120 people and has built a strong market position across Europe over more than five decades. The acquisition expands Burckhardt's biogas offering at a moment when upgrading and compression infrastructure is becoming a genuine bottleneck in European biomethane deployment. What's worth noting is the signal this sends: industrial equipment players are consolidating the supply chain in anticipation of a significant scaling wave.

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Greenlane and Panasonic Strike a Local Manufacturing Deal That Repositions Brazil as a Biomethane Production Hub

🇧🇷 Brazil | Bioenergy Insight

Canadian biogas upgrading specialist Greenlane Renewables has formalized an agreement with Panasonic do Brasil to manufacture its next-generation Cascade LF landfill gas upgrading technology locally, at Panasonic’s facility in São José dos Campos, São Paulo state. Initial investment is expected to reach between 8 million and 10 million Brazilian Reais, approximately €1.6 to €2 million, with Panasonic covering facility modifications, tooling, production equipment, and working capital, while Greenlane retains control of product design, supply chain management, sales, and commissioning. The first system is targeted for delivery by the end of 2026. Greenlane’s CEO described Brazil as a priority launch market, citing established biofuels infrastructure, abundant organic feedstocks, and a supportive environment for biomethane production. Industry forecasts point to a potential sevenfold increase in Brazil’s biomethane output by 2035, at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 21%.

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Project Spotlights

Egypt’s First PPP Wastewater Plant Gets a Biogas Power Unit, A Retrofit Model That Could Scale Across Africa’s Largest Economy

🇪🇬 Egypt | Smart Water Magazine

Joint venture Orasqualia, formed by Orascom Construction and AqualiaME, has reached an agreement with Egypt’s New Urban Communities Authority to install a biogas power generation unit at the New Cairo Wastewater Treatment Plant. Operational since 2013 as Egypt’s first public-private partnership wastewater project, the plant will use its new unit to convert biogas produced during sewage treatment into on-site electricity, reducing the facility’s reliance on external energy and improving its overall environmental performance. The retrofit pathway is what makes this significant: you don’t need a new facility to start capturing biogas value. You need the right agreement structure and the willingness to treat an existing waste stream as an energy asset. That logic is directly replicable across Egypt’s substantial wastewater estate, and across the wider African continent, where hundreds of operational wastewater plants are producing biogas that is currently flared or vented.

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Brazil’s Biorrota Project Puts a 74-Tonne Biomethane Truck on the Sugar Route to the Port of Santos, Fuelled by the Same Cane It’s Carrying

🇧🇷 Brazil | Click Petróleo e Gás

The Biorrota project, developed with Coperçúcar and transport operators on Brazil's sugar export corridor, has deployed a biomethane-powered 6×4 heavy truck with nine axles and a 74-tonne capacity on one of the country's most demanding logistics routes, from sugarcane mills to the Port of Santos. The fuel is produced by the anaerobic digestion of vinasse, a residue from the sugarcane ethanol process, meaning the truck is powered by a by-product of the commodity it is transporting. With extended tanks, the vehicle achieves a range of up to 700 km, and the engine delivers 460 horsepower and 2,300 Nm of torque. The transmission was tuned specifically for heavy-load gas operation, including a retarder for the steep descent of the Serra de Santos. If the economics hold, it opens a template for closed-loop fuel cycles in other agricultural commodity chains where organic residues are currently treated as disposal problems rather than energy assets.

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Tech, Science & Innovation

Seaweed Hydrochar Modified With Cobalt Boosts Methane From Antibiotic-Contaminated Chicken Manure by 25% While Cutting Resistance Genes by 65%

🇨🇳 China | EurekAlert / EurekAlert!

Researchers at Shenyang Agricultural University have demonstrated that a cobalt-modified hydrochar derived from Enteromorpha, a green macroalga responsible for large-scale coastal bloom events, can significantly improve anaerobic digestion performance when treating antibiotic-contaminated chicken manure. The best-performing treatment increased methane production by 25% compared to controls, achieved 37.4% removal of the antibiotic sulfadimethazine, and reduced sulfonamide resistance genes sul1 and sul2 by 65.66%. The mechanism operates through strengthened direct interspecies electron transfer, effectively making the microbial communities in the digester more cooperative under antibiotic stress. The material also enriched syntrophic bacteria critical to methane-producing ecosystems. Antibiotic-contaminated livestock manure is one of the most difficult feedstocks in anaerobic digestion. A material that simultaneously improves methane yields, removes antibiotic residues, and reduces resistance gene spread addresses three distinct problems in a single process step. Industrial-scale validation is still required, but the architecture of the solution is compelling.

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Spain's Turn2X Plant Claims a European First: Synthetic Methane From Green Hydrogen and Biogenic CO₂, Injected Directly Into the Gas Grid

🇪🇸 Spain | Click Petróleo e Gás

Turn2X's T2X project in Miajadas, Extremadura, backed by the European Commission through the third auction of the European Hydrogen Bank, is producing renewable natural gas by combining green hydrogen with biogenic CO₂ captured from a nearby bioethanol plant, using Power-to-Gas technology. The resulting high-purity synthetic methane has been successfully injected into Gas Extremadura's distribution network, a process the company describes as a European first for direct grid supply. The plant is targeting 9 MW of electrolysis capacity and approximately 6,390 tonnes of renewable hydrogen production over its first decade, with financing contracts expected in the final quarter of 2026 and a fixed European premium of €0.62 per kilogram of certified hydrogen produced over ten years. The relevance for the biogas sector extends beyond the headline: biogenic CO₂, a by-product of biomethane upgrading, is precisely the feedstock this process requires. As biomethane production scales across Europe, the CO₂ currently vented or sequestered becomes a valuable input for synthetic gas production. The two pathways are not in competition; they are potentially complementary layers of a converging renewable gas architecture.

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Osaka Gas Converts Used Bioplastic Bento Containers Into Biogas And Shows That Sewage Plants Can Accept Entirely New Waste Streams

🇯🇵 Japan | World Bio Market Insights

Osaka Gas, in collaboration with the city of Osaka and Osaka Metropolitan University, has conducted a demonstration experiment converting used bioplastic bento containers from a university cafeteria into biogas at a municipal sewage treatment facility. Nearly 1,000 containers were decomposed into lactic acid, which was then introduced into sewage sludge in a digester tank. The process ran smoothly, and previous smaller-scale tests showed that lactic acid additions can increase biogas production from sewage sludge by approximately three times. The company estimates that around 3,500 containers could generate enough biogas to supply roughly 30 households daily. A commercially deployable process is targeted for around 2030. The broader implication is significant: this frames the sewage treatment facility not just as a waste processor, but as an integrated receiver of multiple organic waste streams simultaneously, each contributing to a higher-yielding biogas output. Japan’s government target of two million tonnes of bioplastic use by 2030 would make this feedstock pathway increasingly material at scale, and a practical end-of-life solution for bioplastics is one of the sector’s most persistent unsolved problems.

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Expansion & Trends

Homes Across Wrexham Are Being Heated by Sewage Collected From All of North Wales And Most People Had No Idea

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Wales, UK | Wrexham.com

Welsh Water's advanced anaerobic digestion facility in Wrexham processes sewage sludge transported from wastewater treatment works across the entire North Wales region, including Ruthin, which serves a population of over 6,400 and discharges to the Afon Clwyd. The sludge is processed under high pressure, producing methane that is cleaned and injected directly into the National Grid. The result: Wrexham residents are heating their homes and cooking using energy recovered from human waste collected across a whole region. Welsh Water has also invested more than £5 million in its Ruthin site to reduce phosphorus discharge levels. The facility is energy self-sufficient, combining biogas output with on-site solar. A regional water utility built a functioning circular energy system from wastewater, integrated it into the national gas grid, and most of the public, including a visiting Senedd Member, had no idea it was happening. This is what embedded biogas infrastructure looks like in practice.

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44,000 Households Recycled 95 Tonnes of Food in the First Week of a New Collection Service, All of It Going to Anaerobic Digestion

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Greater Birmingham Chambers

Cannock Chase District launched its new food waste collection service on 27 April, distributing seven-litre indoor caddies, 23-litre outdoor kerbside caddies, and compostable liners to approximately 44,000 households as part of England's national mandatory food waste separation rollout. In the first week alone, residents recycled over 95 tonnes, all of it sent to an anaerobic digestion facility in Cannock, where it is converted into renewable energy, with resulting digestate returned to agriculture as a soil improver. The council's head of operations noted that average households discard approximately £800 worth of edible food annually, and that participation in the scheme can drive both waste reduction and behavioural change. The result, 95 tonnes in week one, points to something consistent across every mandatory food waste rollout: when infrastructure is provided, and the pathway is clear, people participate. The feedstock is available. The AD capacity exists. The missing link, repeatedly, has been the collection system. Mandatory household food waste separation is the unlock, and England is now delivering it nationally.

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We Are Biogas is a curated weekly newsletter covering the global biogas, biomethane, RNG, and anaerobic digestion landscape.

Want to be featured? Email: alexandra@wearebiogas.com

Ben Martin didn’t plan to work in biogas. He planned to play rugby for as long as his body would allow. When it didn’t, he landed in wastewater treatment, which turned out to be a better apprenticeship than most. What he found when anaerobic digestion arrived on his site changed everything. The technology wasn’t spectacular. The realization was: the same organic molecules that were a cost line on one side of the balance sheet were the energy source on the other.

That observation, simple in hindsight and profound in its implications, is the lens through which Ben Martin, Founder and Director of Redrock Bioenergy, now approaches everything from feedstock chemistry to Irish regulatory architecture to the carbon accounting conventions he believes the entire global industry needs to rethink. Redrock Bioenergy is a specialist consultancy in the anaerobic digestion and biomethane space, having evolved from optimizing and managing AD facilities in transition, through assisting developers deliver projects from feedstock strategy to performance testing, to its current position: the capacity to build, own, and operate its own assets across the full project lifecycle.

Martin’s background makes him an unusual voice in a sector that can, at times, speak primarily to itself. He came up through process data and discharge consent parameters. He thinks in volatile solids loading rates and C:N ratios, but he also thinks in rugby team positions and patient metaphors about microbial culture. That combination, rigorous technical depth alongside an instinct for human communication, is increasingly rare. And it makes him exactly the kind of practitioner the industry needs more of at a moment when the gap between what biogas demonstrably does and what the public, the planning system, and the policy apparatus believes it does remains frustratingly wide.

From the Scrum to the SCADA Screen

The transition from elite rugby to anaerobic digestion doesn’t appear in any career guidance document, but Martin’s account of it reveals something important about the transferable logic of both disciplines. Rugby, at its best, is a systems sport: no single position wins a match, and the collapse of any one function, a front row losing a scrum, a lineout caller misreading the defense, can unravel everything the other fourteen players have built. Wastewater treatment, it turned out, operated on the same principle. Performance is legible through numbers. Consequences of getting it wrong show up fast. Discipline across every function is non-negotiable.

When an anaerobic digestion plant was added to his site, the data changed character. Suddenly, it wasn’t just compliance numbers. It was methane yield per cubic meter of sludge, parasitic load being stripped from the grid, throughput being balanced to maximize generation without flaring gas and wasting energy.

That recognition, of value hiding in plain sight inside a process the industry was treating as a disposal problem, is the intellectual thread running through everything Redrock Bioenergy does. It shows up in how Ben approaches feedstock optimization, in how he describes digestate, in how he frames the methane abatement case for policymakers, and in the specific critique he makes of an industry that, in his view, consistently optimizes for the wrong metrics.

The Living System

There’s a moment Ben describes that biogas engineers will recognize immediately and that everyone else should hear. He was on a plant that was underperforming, yields down, foaming worsening, operators chasing their tails. He spent a week pulling apart the data and found not one problem but six, all interacting: ammonia, pH, volatile fatty acids, methanogens, mixing, foaming. Every individual intervention was rational. Collectively, they were strangling the plant.

That framing is more than a vivid metaphor. It’s a precise description of why AD plants fail at a rate that better-managed engineering would prevent. The four-stage biology of anaerobic digestion, hydrolysis, acidogenesis, acetogenesis, and methanogenesis is carried out by distinct microbial communities in dynamic equilibrium with each other. Disturb one stage without accounting for its downstream effects, and the cascade is rapid, non-linear, and expensive. The methanogenic archaea at the end of the chain, which produce the gas the plant exists to capture, are among the most chemically sensitive organisms in commercial use anywhere in industry. They respond to ammonia accumulation, to C:N imbalance, to hydraulic shear, to trace element depletion, to feeding rhythm.

Ben diagnoses where the industry consistently staffs this problem incorrectly, in rugby terms, he calls it the front row problem.

For anyone outside the industry, the translation is straightforward: the operating philosophy of an anaerobic digestion plant is closer to a winery or a fermentation facility than to a gas processing plant. The biology is the asset. The engineering exists to serve it. When those roles are inverted, and the mechanical logic dominates while the biological logic gets treated as a secondary variable, the plant suffers. And the suffering is slow, compounding, and difficult to reverse.

The Feedstock Insight That Doubled Gas Output

Redrock’s technical differentiation goes beyond Rugby analogies. Ben describes a feedstock optimization decision that illustrates precisely the kind of engineering thinking the sector needs more of at scale. Moving from 200,000 tonnes per annum of food-organics-anchored feedstock to 250,000 tonnes per annum with the addition of 50,000 tonnes of maize silage and ryegrass cover-crop took gross annual biogas output from roughly 10.9 million cubic meters of methane to roughly 21.7 million. A 100% increase in gas output from a 25% increase in feedstock volume.

The insight behind that result wasn’t about adding volume. It was about understanding what the digester biology actually requires. Mass matters far less than volatile solids content. Food waste runs at 25 to 30% VS on a wet-weight basis, a function of high moisture in fruit and vegetable streams. Maize silage runs at 28 to 32% VS on a much lower moisture base. Per tonne entering the digester, the crop carries materially more biodegradable solids. The biochemical methane potential per kilogram of VS is comparable to or better than the food-waste benchmark.

The second insight concerns carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. Pure food waste is nitrogen-rich, with a C:N around 12 to 15:1, which drives ammonia accumulation and methanogen inhibition under load. Maize silage runs at 25 to 30:1. Co-digesting in the right proportions brings the working C:N inside the digester toward the 20 to 30:1 optimum for stable mesophilic operation. The digester runs healthier, ammonia inhibition retreats, VS destruction is more complete, and gas yield per kilogram of fed VS rises. As Ben puts it, the maize and ryegrass combination is a biologically operating ballast as much as a feedstock.

The third layer is pretreatment. Maize stalks and ryegrass leaf hold a significant fraction of their cellulose and hemicellulose inside lignin matrices that mesophilic methanogens can’t access without help. An acid hydrolysis pretreatment at the front end unlocks that lignocellulosic fraction. Ben notes that acid hydrolysis sounds alarming to non-engineers but is straightforward in practice, and that the sector’s failure to explain its own processes accessibly is one of its most persistent and costly communication failures.

The broader principle: optimize for biochemical methane potential multiplied by volatile solids content, not gate fee multiplied by tonnage. Most developers do the latter. The discipline that returns is to treat feedstock as the design input that drives every downstream sizing decision, not as a passive revenue variable.

Ireland’s Structural Problem and What Actually Fixes It

Ben’s analysis of Ireland’s biogas development environment is precise and uncomfortable in equal measure. Ireland has set a target of 5.7 TWh of biomethane to the gas grid, has two operational injection facilities producing approximately 75 GWh per year, less than 1.5% of the 2030 target, and needs to commission roughly 150 new AD plants at a rate of approximately one every ten days, sustained from now until 2030, in a country that has commissioned two in the entire last decade. The target, as he states plainly, won’t be met.

The easy answer is the Route to Market: the RHO delay, the planning inconsistency, the grid economics. Ben’s diagnosis goes deeper. The fundamental barrier is the absence of a coherent farm-to-grid-to-farm value chain in which nutrients flow as fluently as gas does. An anaerobic digestion plant’s bankability is determined as much by digestate offtake as by gas offtake. A 200,000 tonne per annum plant produces roughly 180,000 tonnes of digestate per year. That material has to go somewhere legal, economic, and durable for a 20-year asset life. Ireland’s Nitrates Directive derogation, historically generous, is tightening under EU pressure and ongoing water quality enforcement. Spreading land is contested. No amount of RHO premium fixes a plant whose digestate lagoon is full and whose nearest spreading land is 90 kilometers away.

The reason the barrier persists is institutional. Anaerobic digestion in Ireland sits across at least four government departments: Climate, Energy and Environment; Agriculture, Food and the Marine; Housing, Local Government and Heritage; and the EPA, and none of them owns it. A developer pursuing a 200,000 ktpa plant has to win simultaneously at all four. Lose anyone, and the project fails. The four don’t communicate on consistent timelines. The RHO design didn’t factor in RENURE timelines. The planning regime doesn’t factor in feedstock catchment logic. The EPA hasn’t published end-of-waste criteria for digestate, which means the same material is technically a waste for one regulator and a fertilizer for another.

The February 2026 adoption of Directive (EU) 2026/288, formally amending the Nitrates Directive to allow RENURE-grade processed digestate to be treated as chemical-fertilizer equivalent and applied above the 170 kg N/ha cap, is a genuine structural shift. In principle, it resolves the digestate land-bank constraint that has been the silent killer of Irish project finance. In practice, Ireland still has to transpose the directive, the EPA still has to publish end-of-waste criteria, and the nutrient-stripping infrastructure that turns ordinary digestate into RENURE-grade material doesn’t yet exist on Irish AD sites. The EU layer creates the constraint and creates the fix, but the fix is multi-year.

The Evergreen project is the clearest proof Ben points to that the Irish regulatory bottleneck can be navigated. It did so through a specific and not widely replicable route: a feedstock composed entirely of industrial process by-products, with no domestic food waste, animal manures, or animal by-product materials. That single design decision removed the plant from the EPA Industrial Emissions License regime, compressed the consenting timeline dramatically, and allowed first gas in under four years rather than the seven-plus a conventional approach would require. The lesson is real. The scalability is limited by the finite availability of qualifying industrial feedstocks.

What world-best Irish policy would actually look like, in Ben’s framing, isn’t an incrementalist patch. It’s a single biomethane delivery agency with cross-departmental authority, modeled on the Danish Energy Agency, accountable to one minister, with RHO, capital grants, RENURE implementation, planning guidelines, and EPA end-of-waste criteria all on one delivery timeline. Add a statutory cluster framework rewarding co-location within 15 kilometers with cooperative farm ownership, a RENURE delivery program funded from the capital allocation, a redesigned RHO built around method-based rather than origin-based premiums, and a national AD planning code that removes local-authority-by-local-authority variability. That package isn’t radical. It’s integrated. Denmark proved the model works. Ireland has more agricultural feedstock per capita and the highest per-capita biomethane potential in the EU.

The Conversation the Industry Isn’t Having

The sharpest observation Ben made was the one the industry most consistently avoids. Methane accounting.

A 250 ktpa anaerobic digestion plant displaces fossil gas at the burner tip, one climate benefit, the one universally counted. It also avoids roughly 80,000 to 150,000 tonnes of methane-equivalent emissions per year that would otherwise have entered the atmosphere from the alternative disposal pathway. Over a 20-year period, methane is approximately 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO₂. The avoidance side of the ledger is frequently larger than the displacement side. Most reporting frameworks count one and ignore the other. Most support mechanisms price one and ignore the other.

The consequence is structural: biomethane gets priced and supported as a renewable-energy substitution play, when it’s more accurately a methane-abatement infrastructure play that produces energy as a co-product. The reframe changes the policy logic, the carbon accounting, and the corporate offtake conversation simultaneously. A cement manufacturer or data center with a Scope 1 abatement target is buying avoided methane first and, attached to that, a gas molecule it can use. The industry’s failure to lead with that argument means the wrong policy levers keep getting pulled and the wrong economic value keeps being left on the table.

Ben’s prescription sits in the same framework he applies to digestate communication, to planning objections, to investor conversations, and to the five different policy desks that each require a different version of the same project case. The vocabulary needs a rebuild. Digestate is a bio-fertilizer product, full stop. Pasteurization at 70 degrees Celsius for one hour is the same temperature-time profile used in commercial milk pasteurization. A 200 ktpa biomethane plant is a small refinery for biological feedstocks. And the methane it prevents from reaching the atmosphere is as central to the case for building it as the gas that flows into the grid.

The Final Whistle

Rugby gave Ben Martin a framework for understanding systems long before he understood biogas. Every position performs, or the whole thing falls apart. You don’t move the ball without the front row holding. You don’t hold the front row without the locks and back row digging in to stabilize. Your backline won’t function without a solid lineout, and your defensive system will be continually stressed if your attack constantly falters. The loss of any single function doesn’t merely weaken the team. It invalidates the work of every other position.

He applies that logic without apology to everything Redrock Bioenergy touches. Feedstock acquisition, process biology, mechanical reliability, gas chemistry, planning, finance, regulatory compliance, digestate offtake, community engagement, and carbon accounting. These aren’t departments that hand work off in sequence. They’re positions on the same field, and every one of them has to perform for the asset to deliver what it’s capable of delivering. The plants that fail in year two were staffed for a refinery. They treated the digester as a vessel and the biology as a given. The plants that run for 25 years were built by people who understood that the biology is the team, and that no formation survives contact with reality unless every position knows its role.

The biogas sector is building something that matters, materially, at scale, in real tonnes per day, every day, for years. The feedstocks exist. The technology is proven. The climate case is stronger than the industry has yet been willing to state in full, because the full case includes the methane that doesn’t get made. That number changes everything. What the sector needs, in Ireland, in the UK, in Australia, in every market where the conversation is still predominantly about subsidies and planning delays, is the discipline to tell that story completely. The gas that goes into the grid, the methane that never reaches the atmosphere, the nutrients that go back into the soil, and the communities that get durable local infrastructure instead of a landfill and a slow leak. All of it. Every position.

The full game is worth playing. It just requires every position to show up.

About Redrock Bioenergy

Redrock Bioenergy unites decades of specialist expertise in digester design, biomethane upgrading, waste management, and regulatory compliance across the UK, Ireland, and Australia. Our holistic, non-siloed approach transforms complex feedstocks, including FOGO and industrial organics, into scalable biomethane facilities, delivering superior commercial viability and risk mitigation from feasibility through to full commissioning.

https://redrockbioenergy.com/

Get in Touch

To learn more about Ben Martin’s work, reach out at: ben@redrockbioenergy.com

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We Are Biogas Exclusive

Inside the $450 Billion Engineering Race to Unlock Biogas

By Alexandra Arndt · May 11

In this week’s exclusive, we move from policy and capital into the industrial machinery that determines whether promising biogas projects actually get built. At the center of the conversation is Kevin Gross, founder of Gross & Co., a senior-led engineering firm that has identified a precise and costly gap in the biogas development pipeline: the front end. With 2,600 operating biogas systems in the US and room for 17,000 more, the constraint isn’t feedstock, technology, or even capital. It’s the slow, expensive, and often assumption-laden work that happens before a project can attract financing. Kevin’s answer is an assumptions-first methodology and a compressed six-week sprint to a Class 2 estimate — roughly 85% faster than industry standard. What emerges is a reframing of engineering not as a technical service layer, but as the primary risk management tool in the waste-to-value economy. The $450 billion opportunity on the table will not be unlocked by better science alone. It will be unlocked by better front-end definition.

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Policy & Capital

UK Rail Network Becomes a Biogas Feedstock Source: 104,000 kg of Food Waste Diverted in a Single Year

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Railway PRO

Greater Anglia has diverted over 104,000 kg of food waste from its rail network into anaerobic digestion over the past year. A more than fourfold increase from the previous reporting period. The shift followed the UK's Simpler Recycling workplace regulations and infrastructure upgrades across stations and depots. All collected waste is processed by Carlisle Support Services into biogas and biofertilizer, diverting 94% of the operator's food waste from landfill. What makes this notable is not the volume alone, but the mechanism: waste streams embedded in transport infrastructure, often overlooked, are being systematically redirected into the biogas supply chain. Rail networks as feedstock sources represent a largely untapped but operationally scalable input for AD.

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Hungary Has the Ambition, the Feedstock, and the Targets; Now it Needs 20–25 Biomethane Plants to Get Built

🇭🇺 Hungary | CEE Energy News

At the Budapest Biogas Summit, industry figures revealed that Hungary plans to build 20 to 25 larger biomethane plants in the coming years, as the country targets a tripling of its total biogas production to 600 million cubic metres by 2030. Biomethane production currently sits at just 5.4 million cubic metres annually, produced by only two plants, against a target of 184 million cubic metres. The Summit made clear that the challenge is not ambition but execution: the regulatory and incentive framework has lagged behind stated policy goals, and stakeholders are calling for stable, bankable support schemes to attract the investment required. The agricultural-energy integration dimension was a recurring theme; biomethane's potential here is inseparable from how effectively the sector mobilises farmers as active participants in the supply chain.

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Latvia Just Approved €5M to Let Small Producers Access the Gas Grid Without Individual Connections

🇱🇻 Latvia | Gasworld

The Latvian government has approved a €4.7 million investment to construct two new biomethane injection points in Ragana and Rēzekne, operated by transmission system operator Conexus Baltic Grid. The infrastructure allows smaller producers to compress biomethane and transport it by container to centralized entry points, removing the barrier of individual grid connections. Latvia has now effectively cut its dependence on Russian gas and is actively building a self-reliant renewable gas architecture. This latest approval builds on an earlier injection point in Džūkste and an oversubscribed support programme that attracted demand more than triple its initial allocation. The signal is clear: investor appetite for Latvian biomethane is running well ahead of available public funding.

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Project Spotlights

As India’s LPG Supply Crisis Deepens, Cow Dung Digesters Are Keeping Village Kitchens Running

🇮🇳 India | South China Morning Post

In Uttar Pradesh villages, households equipped with biogas digesters fed by cow dung are cooking through an LPG supply crisis that is generating long queues across much of India. The energy crunch, exacerbated by instability in the Middle East affecting LPG imports, has given fresh visibility to decentralised biogas as genuine energy infrastructure rather than a rural curiosity. India consumes over 30 million tonnes of LPG annually, importing more than half its needs. In a Hindu-majority nation where cattle are culturally central, cow dung carries multi-layered practical value: biogas for cooking, digestate for fertiliser, and energy independence from volatile import markets. This is not a technology story; it is a resilience story. And it is playing out at household level, right now.

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Institutional Capital Arrives in Italian Biomethane as Sosteneo Moves to Acquire a Project Portfolio

🇮🇹 Italy | Renewables Now

Italian infrastructure investor Sosteneo, part of the Generali Investments ecosystem and manager of over €700 million in clean energy funds, is expanding its biomethane exposure through Italian project portfolio acquisitions. Italy's biomethane sector has become one of the most active investment environments in Europe, underpinned by the NRRP-funded auction system, 15-year feed-in tariffs, and capital grants. With nearly 572 projects funded and approximately 2.3 billion cubic metres of new annual capacity in development through 2026, Italy has built the pipeline that institutional capital is now following. Sosteneo's move reflects a broader pattern: as European biomethane exits the development phase, infrastructure-grade investors are arriving to consolidate early-mover assets into managed long-term portfolios.

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HAM Group Has Biomethane at Every Pump Across 140+ European stations

🇪🇸 Spain / Europe | Bioenergy Insight

Spain’s HAM Group has completed the rollout of bioLNG and bioCNG across its entire service station network, more than 140 stations across Spain and wider Europe, following a process initiated in late 2025. The key commercial signal here is interoperability: existing gas-powered vehicles require no modification to refuel with biomethane. This removes one of the most persistent demand-side barriers in transport decarbonisation. HAM’s rollout, combined with interest from operators like UK retailer Marks & Spencer, which is expanding its bioCNG heavy goods vehicle fleet toward 300 trucks, suggests that biomethane as a transport fuel is transitioning from pilot to mainstream procurement. The refuelling network is now in place; adoption dynamics will depend on whether fleet operators treat this as a strategic shift or a compliance option.

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Tech, Science & Innovation

WSU Researchers Triple Biogas Yields From Sewage Sludge With Two-Stage System

🇺🇸 United States | New Atlas

Researchers at Washington State University have developed a two-stage process, the Advanced Pretreatment and Anaerobic Digestion (APAD) system, that tripled renewable natural gas output compared to conventional anaerobic digestion, achieving an overall carbon conversion efficiency of 83% from sewage sludge. The system combines an Advanced Wet Oxidation and Steam Explosion pretreatment stage to break down resistant organic compounds with a secondary digestion phase, then upgrades the resulting biogas using a novel bacterial strain, Methanothermobacter wolfeii, that converts residual CO₂ into additional methane. Beyond the yield gains, the process also cuts sludge disposal costs from $494 to $253 per dry ton. The team has patented the bacterial strain and is pursuing an industrial scale-up partner, with funding from the US Department of Energy. The broader implication is that wastewater treatment, currently a significant energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter, could be restructured into a net energy producer at significant scale.

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Biogas-to-Hydrogen Via Ceramic Membrane: A New Convergence Technology

🇪🇺 Europe (Spain / Norway) | Youris

At a wastewater treatment plant in Navarra, Spain, the EU-funded CARMA-H2 project is testing a proton-conducting ceramic membrane technology that converts biogas directly into low-carbon hydrogen in a single integrated step. Developed by CoorsTek Membrane Sciences (Oslo) and coordinated by the Industrial Association of Navarra, the system eliminates multiple conventional conversion stages, compresses hydrogen electrochemically in the same process, and produces capture-ready biogenic CO₂ as a by-product eligible for carbon credits. The demonstration site feeds on biogas already produced from the plant's existing waste management operations. What is emerging here is a convergence pathway: biogas infrastructure enabling hydrogen production, with the CO₂ by-product reusable in agri-food. For policymakers looking to connect biogas, hydrogen, and carbon markets in a single investment, this is worth watching closely.

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Researchers Just Certified a Biogas Pathway From Açaí Seeds That Doesn't Exist Anywhere Else in the World

🇧🇷 Brazil | G1 Globo

Researchers at the State University of Amapá have received a technical and economic viability certificate for a project converting açaí seeds and other Amazonian organic residues into biogas via anaerobic digestion. The purified output, biomethane, can directly substitute LPG cooking cylinders. The researcher leading the project noted that biogas from açaí, coconut, or Brazil nuts is virtually unknown globally, making this a genuinely novel feedstock pathway. The project is being positioned explicitly within the context of Amapá's energy identity: a state preparing for oil investment but seeking to anchor its energy future in locally produced, sustainable resources. This is a small project with a large framing, waste-to-gas as a statement of regional sovereignty.

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Expansion & Trends

Krispy Kreme's UK Operations Send 25% of Leftover Doughnuts to Anaerobic Digestion

🍩 United Kingdom | Mashed

Krispy Kreme's UK FAQ confirms that 25% of the chain's unsold or unacceptable quality doughnuts are sent for anaerobic digestion and converted into biofuel, with 94% of total food waste diverted from landfill overall. The remaining waste is processed by Leafield Feeds Ltd into animal feed components. This is a small data point, but it belongs to a larger pattern: food service waste streams, from rail operators to doughnut chains, are increasingly being treated as biogas feedstock rather than disposal problems. The contrast with US operations, which generated nearly 30,000 tonnes of food waste in 2024 with limited transparency on disposition, also illustrates how policy and operational culture shape the same company's waste behaviour across markets. Demand for AD capacity is, in part, a function of how seriously food businesses are held to waste diversion standards.

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The real drama of the energy transition unfolds in the gap between potential and operational reality. It’s a gap measured in carbon credits, technology breakthroughs, and in the rigorous, often unheralded work of front-end engineering. This is the industrial friction where promising ideas go to die. Not because the science fails, but because the development process stalls. To understand how to bridge this divide, I sat down with Kevin Gross, founder of Gross & Co. Kevin has positioned his firm as a senior-led, fast-moving alternative to traditional engineering giants, driven by a singular realization: he doesn’t just see biogas as a fuel, but as a waste-to-value paradigm that is ready to scale, provided we stop tripping over our own feet during the development phase.

The scale of what’s at stake is difficult to overstate. The biogas industry is undergoing a high-stakes transformation from a niche secondary market into a foundational pillar of global waste management and industrial infrastructure. In 2025 alone, the United States added 70 new biogas projects, bringing the total to nearly 2,600 operating systems. Yet, according to the American Biogas Council’s 2026 data, we’ve captured only about one-quarter of our total potential. There is room for 17,000 more projects across the country. We are sitting on a $450 billion industrial frontier that is currently dormant, waiting for the right engineering key to unlock it.

The R&D Lens: Embracing the Messy

Kevin Gross didn’t come to engineering through a traditional EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) path. He started his career in cellulosic biofuels research and development, an origin story that shaped a particular way of thinking about uncertainty. This is where the philosophy of Gross & Co. begins to diverge from the pack.

“What drew me in was the idea that a waste stream is usually not just a disposal problem,” Kevin says. “With the right engineering, it can become energy, a usable product, or a better economic outcome for the owner. Starting in cellulosic biofuels R&D taught me to be comfortable with uncertainty without being casual about it.”

In a traditional engineering environment, uncertainty is often seen as a reason to pause. In Kevin’s world, it’s a variable to be bounded. “In R&D, you are constantly asking what you know, what you do not know, what assumption matters most, and what is the fastest way to prove or disprove it,” he explains. That mindset is critical because waste-to-value projects are inherently messy. Whether it’s swine manure, food waste, or wastewater biosolids, the feedstocks are inconsistent, the data is often incomplete, and the path is rarely settled at the start. In this space, the winning move isn’t waiting for perfect information; it’s defining enough of the project to make the next good decision.

The “Assumptions-First” Architecture

The gap Kevin built his firm to address is a precise one. Historically, developers faced a “bad choice” binary: hire a massive firm and spend too much time and money getting early answers, or move forward on rough assumptions that won’t hold up under the scrutiny of investors or lenders.

“Most projects do not fail because the underlying technology is impossible,” Kevin notes. “They fail because the front end is too slow, too expensive, or too fuzzy.”

This is where the concept of FEL (Front-End Loading) moves from a textbook term to a survival strategy. To a farmer, a municipality, or a food waste hauler, FEL is the bridge between interest and action. It’s the work that turns “this sounds like it could be a good idea” into “here is what we would actually build, what it would cost, what it would make, and what could go wrong.”

Gross & Co. operates on an assumptions-first approach. Instead of treating an unknown as a stop-work event, they log it, bound it, and show what it does to the cost and performance. This keeps the momentum alive, something tight-margin projects can’t afford to lose. “Investors do not need fake certainty,” Kevin says. “They need a credible decision framework. Once the unknowns are named and bounded, the conversation gets better.”

Collapsing the Timeline

In a sector where development cycles are notorious for dragging into months of avoidable churn, Kevin’s team has pioneered a compressed six-week sprint to reach a Class 2 estimate, a timeframe roughly 85% faster than the industry standard. This speed is achieved by breaking the traditional, linear engineering sequence. While standard firms often run disciplines, process, civil, electrical, and estimating, one after another, Gross & Co. runs them in parallel.

“We lock the basis early, define assumptions clearly, and run disciplines in parallel instead of handing work off one after another,” Kevin explains. This allows estimating to develop alongside engineering rather than waiting until the design is finished. The backbone of this innovation is the early use of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). By coding the project at its inception, every quantity and assumption becomes traceable. When the scope shifts, the estimate shifts with it instantly.

However, collapsing the timeline requires more than just a new workflow; it requires “pattern recognition.” Kevin has intentionally built a team where specialists like Joe Baranski (30+ years in process modeling) and Dan Humphres (30 years in I&C) are the ones actually doing the work. In the high-stakes early stages of a $250M dairy cluster or a $6B SAF plant, this level of experience is the ultimate de-risking tool. These senior specialists see the blind spots between disciplines and catch the interface issues that less experienced teams miss, ensuring that the final handoff to a contractor is priceable and buildable.

Waste-to-Value for Communities

While the technical details fuel the industry’s engine, the “why” behind these projects is what bridges the gap to the public. Kevin’s deliberate use of the term “waste-to-value” is a shift in language that matters to the average American. Most people don’t think about renewable natural gas (RNG) pathways, but they do think about manure, landfill emissions, odor, and disposal costs.

“Waste-to-value is a clearer description of what the project is doing,” Kevin says. “It is taking a liability and turning it into energy, a product, or a better economic outcome.”

Take food waste projects, for example. From the outside, it looks like the goal is to sell gas. In reality, the primary economic pillar is often the tip fee, the fee paid to receive and process a material that someone else needs to get rid of. When the engineering for contamination control and pre-treatment is solid, these projects become community assets that solve a disposal crisis while producing renewable energy as a bonus.

The same logic applies to municipal wastewater and biosolids. Municipalities today are facing a perfect storm of disposal costs and the looming regulatory pressure of PFAS (forever chemicals). Gross & Co. is currently working on biochar projects that convert biosolids into a product that eliminates PFAS risk.

“If you can combine biogas recovery, solids management, and newer outlets like biochar into one practical strategy, you are not just making fuel,” Kevin explains. “You are solving disposal, compliance, odor, and resiliency at the same time. That is when the project gets more durable.”

The Incentives Engine: Engineering the Credits

In the United States, the economics of biogas are inextricably linked to policy, 45Q, 45Z, LCFS, and RINs. But Kevin warns that these shouldn’t be treated as a finance layer added after the engineering is done. They are, in fact, engineering problems in disguise.

The incentive strategy depends entirely on the engineering basis: what the battery limits are, what is being measured, and the uptime assumptions. “Where people get it wrong is assuming credits stack cleanly by default,” Kevin says. At Gross & Co., the engineering basis and the incentive strategy are built together from day one. If the scope shifts, the incentive basis shifts with it. This ensures that the technical story and the commercial story remain perfectly aligned for third-party diligence.

The Path to 17,000

As we look toward the potential of 17,000 new projects, the path forward isn’t necessarily about a single technology breakthrough. It’s about repeatability. It’s about building a development system that doesn’t have to relearn the same lessons on every project.

If Kevin could change one structural thing about the U.S. biogas ecosystem, it would be to strengthen the predevelopment layer. “Too many projects try to jump from concept into financing or EPC conversations without enough money or time set aside for real front-end definition,” he says. “That is where bad assumptions get baked in.”

Strengthening this early phase would improve financing outcomes, permitting outcomes, and community trust. A project that is better defined is a project that is more likely to be built and operated with confidence.

A Global Conversation

The momentum in the biogas space is a global phenomenon. Whether it’s a dairy cluster in the Midwest or a SAF plant in Europe, the lessons are the same: the real risk hides at the interfaces, and the front-end definition is what protects the owner.

Kevin Gross is building a version of Gross & Co. that acts as a senior-led platform to take projects from early screening through FEL and FEED quickly, without losing rigor. Success, in his view, is more than revenue growth; it’s more projects reaching real decisions sooner and fewer projects dying in the churn.

“Biogas is not just an energy story,” Kevin concludes. “It sits at the intersection of environment, infrastructure, and day-to-day practicality.”

The era of “garbage” is dead. We are entering the era of value, where our liabilities are our greatest opportunities. The sleeping giant of the 17,000 potential projects is waking up, and for the teams that can navigate the messy middle with speed and discipline, the future is incredibly bright.

To learn more about Kevin Gross and his work at Gross & Co, email him or visit their website:
kevin@grosscompany.net
https://www.grosscompany.net/

Maruti Suzuki India Limited is doing something genuinely fascinating in India right now, and it should have the entire transport sector paying attention.

At its Gujarat site, the company is processing up to 100 tonnes of cow dung per day through #anaerobicdigestion, producing around 1.5 tonnes of compressed biogas (CBG) daily.

That’s enough to fuel roughly 850 vehicles every single day.

This isn’t just a renewable energy project, though.

It’s a closed-loop fuel ecosystem.

Agricultural waste → energy production → vehicle fuel → back into the local economy.

Suzuki isn’t alone. They’re actively expanding biogas infrastructure in partnership with major players like India’s National Dairy Development Board and dairy cooperatives, with plans for multiple plants and integrated rural mobility systems.

Why does that matter?

Because when automakers start investing upstream into fuel production, it’s a clear signal: The future of transport fuel is being redefined.

Waste is becoming a strategic resource

Energy systems are moving toward decentralized, circular models.

#Biogas, particularly in the form of #biomethane, is gaining traction because it’s:

• Dispatchable (unlike intermittent renewables)

• Compatible with existing CNG infrastructure

• Capable of reducing emissions while solving waste management challenges

And importantly, it creates economic value at the local level, from farmers supplying feedstock to communities benefiting from energy independence.

We’re starting to see a convergence:

🚜 Agriculture
⚡ Energy
🚗 Mobility

All connected through anaerobic digestion.

And companies like Suzuki are building entire fuel ecosystems around it…

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If you’re not already following what’s happening in biogas globally, you’re missing one of the most important energy shifts underway.

👉 The We Are Biogas weekly newsletter breaks down the latest projects, policies, and innovations shaping the industry, delivered in both written and audio formats wherever you get your podcasts.

Stay informed. Because this space is moving fast.

From the EU blocking biomethane support mechanisms in two countries in the same week, to India opening its gas grid to compressed biogas for the first time, to a billion-dollar valuation landing in food waste-to-RNG — the floor is being built in real time.

In this episode, we cover:

• The EU targets France after blocking Ireland’s domestic biomethane multiplier — a pattern every member state needs to watch

• India’s PNGRB approves landmark grid injection guidelines for compressed biogas

• Mobius Renewables acquires Air Liquide’s entire global biogas portfolio across the US and Europe

• Ireland’s RHO design flaw and why it may trigger biomethane imports instead of domestic production

• Divert opens its Longview, Washington facility and hits a billion-dollar valuation backed by Mitsubishi

• Gaia EnviroTech contracted for biogas system at Victoria’s largest mutton abattoir

• Twenty pig farmers in rural Brazil eliminate their gas bills with swine waste biodigesters

• Biogas-to-hydrogen could halve production costs versus electrolysis

• Syzygy Plasmonics begins design on the world’s first electrified biogas-to-SAF plant in Uruguay

• Anaerobic digestion confirmed as the top-performing end-of-life pathway for bio-based plastics

• DOE commits $20.2M to advance algae and wet waste feedstock conversion

• Biogas meets the US data center boom under new federal tax credits

• Zambia’s community biogas model powering homes, irrigation, and food production

• Brazil’s pipeline infrastructure gap identified as the primary biomethane growth constraint

• Evonik brings European membrane upgrading technology to Southeast Asia

Exclusive: Alexandra does a full read-through of this week’s We Are Biogas essay — “Before the Market Can Move, We Have to Build the Floor” — a month-in-the-making analysis drawing on four conversations with practitioners across four continents on why biogas is no longer waiting on technology. It’s waiting on the systems around it.

If you work in renewable gas, energy transition, circular economy, sustainable agriculture, climate tech, or infrastructure investment — this one’s for you.