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:

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Reach out directly: alexandra@wearebiogas.com

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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

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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.

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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.

Read the Article

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.

Read the Article

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!

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!

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

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.

Read the Article

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.

Read the Article

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.

Read the Article

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.

Read the Article

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.

Read the Article

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

Want to be featured? Email me.

Exciting news for the We Are Biogas community!

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!

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!

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.

Read the Article

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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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

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…

—

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.

Want to be featured? Email me.

We Are Biogas Exclusive

Before the Market Can Move, We Have to Build the Floor

By Alexandra Arndt · May 3

What is becoming increasingly clear in biogas is not a problem of potential, but a phase shift in progress. Across regions, policies, and operating contexts, the sector is now actively building the institutional, operational, and commercial foundations that turn isolated projects into something closer to a functioning global market. This month's analysis synthesises four conversations with practitioners at the sharp end of the industry. From a plant performance expert who has spent his career inside the gap between design ambition and operational reality, to Levent Hilmi's ground-level account of Australia's feedstock contracting gridlock, to Md. Ashrafuzzaman Ashraf's work across 4,000 household digesters in Bangladesh, to Simona Amerio's precise account of what it costs an industry in speed and resilience when the people building it aren't representative of the world they're building for. The throughline is consistent: technology is no longer the constraint. The surrounding architecture, certification systems, trading infrastructure, operational standards, carbon accounting, and leadership capacity is. Every headline this month is, in one way or another, a story about a gap being closed.

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Policy & Capital

Mobius Renewables Acquires Air Liquide's Biogas Portfolio, Signalling a New Phase of Industry Consolidation

🇺🇸 🇫🇷 🇳🇴 🇸🇪 US / Europe | BioEnergy Times

Houston-based Mobius Renewables, established in December 2025 by funds managed by IFM Investors, has completed the acquisition of biogas production assets from Air Liquide across the United States and Europe. The deal includes six landfill gas-to-RNG facilities in the US, five farm waste-based plants in France, and a 51% stake in Redo Biosolutions operating across Norway and Sweden. Combined with the existing GreenGasUSA assets, Mobius now has the capacity to produce and distribute more than 5.5 million MMBtu of RNG annually. Air Liquide framed the sale as active portfolio management aligned with selective divestment strategy. What this transaction represents at the sector level is not simply an asset transfer, it is institutional capital, structured specifically for RNG, entering the market through acquisition rather than development. This is consolidation logic: fewer, larger, professionally managed operators absorbing distributed assets and applying standardised operations at scale. It is one of the clearest signals yet that RNG is no longer a development-stage asset class.

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EU Turns Its Sights on France After the Ireland Ruling, Confirming a Pattern of Domestic Biomethane Support Scrutiny

🇪🇺 🇫🇷 Europe / France | gasworld

Following its detailed opinion blocking Ireland's domestic biomethane multiplier under the Renewable Heat Obligation, the European Commission has now turned its scrutiny toward France's biomethane support framework. The pattern here is important. This is not a one-off intervention against a single national program, it is the Commission applying consistent internal market principles to nationally designed biomethane support mechanisms that favour domestic production over EU imports. What Ireland and France are discovering is that the policy architecture most intuitively designed to build domestic industries, mechanisms that reward local production, is precisely the architecture the Commission is most likely to flag. Every member state designing a biomethane support system in 2026 and beyond is now operating with explicit knowledge that the Commission will enforce single market rules against domestic preference mechanisms. The sector needs support designs that are EU-market-compatible from the outset, not as an afterthought. The compliance gap between national ambition and EU rules is now the primary policy risk in European biomethane deployment.

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Ireland’s RHO Design Flaw Will Push Suppliers Toward Imported Biomethane Instead of Domestic Production

🇮🇪 Ireland | Farmer’s Journal

The Irish Government has confirmed it will proceed with the Renewable Heat Obligation without the domestic biomethane multiplier after the European Commission ruled it incompatible with internal market rules. The practical consequence, as the Farmers Journal analysis makes clear, is that without the multiplier, gas suppliers obligated to incorporate renewables into their fuel mix will meet that requirement by purchasing cheaper European biomethane certificates, predominantly sourced from heavily subsidised plants elsewhere in Europe, rather than contracting Irish-produced biomethane. The result is a policy that technically fulfils its renewable heat targets while failing to build the domestic AD industry it was designed to support. Ireland’s 5.7 TWh by 2030 target now looks structurally unreachable under the current framework. A €200 million capital grant scheme has been signalled for Q3 2026, but grant aid without a functioning demand mechanism is a partial solution at best. The deeper issue is that the RHO was the demand mechanism. Without it working as designed, Ireland’s biomethane strategy has lost its commercial anchor.

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India's PNGRB Closes a Critical Infrastructure Gap with Grid Injection Guidelines for Compressed Biogas

🇮🇳 India | DD News

India's Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board has approved comprehensive guidelines for the injection of Compressed Biogas into the country's Natural Gas Pipeline and City Gas Distribution networks, providing, for the first time, a standardized technical and safety framework for pipeline-based evacuation of CBG. Previously, CBG producers were largely limited to cylinder cascade transport by road, a logistically complex and cost-heavy distribution model that constrained project economics at every scale. The new guidelines cover CBG quality specifications, installation procedures, odorization requirements, safety instrumentation, and metering standards. More importantly, they establish the institutional basis for assessing project viability, giving project developers, CGD entities, technology providers, and investors a uniform framework to plan against. This is a structural unlock, not an incremental policy update. The pathway from production to end market is now defined. India's CBG sector has been capacity-constrained not by technology or feedstock, but by this exact missing layer of grid access standards. That gap has now been closed

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Project Spotlights

Gaia EnviroTech Contracted for Biogas System at Ararat Meat Exports, Adding to Australia’s Industrial AD Pipeline

🇦🇺 Australia | West Vic News

Ballarat-based bioenergy and waste management company Gaia EnviroTech has been contracted to build and maintain a renewable biogas energy system for Ararat Meat Exports, Victoria’s largest mutton abattoir, which processes over one million livestock annually. The project adds another data point to a consistent pattern emerging in the Australian meat processing sector: industrial facilities treating their organic waste streams as energy assets rather than disposal liabilities. Read alongside the Casino Food Co AD facility that broke ground in northern New South Wales last week, and the broader context of the Australia biomethane moment explored in our recent exclusive, what is visible is a sector-wide shift in how abattoirs and food processors in Australia are framing their operational footprint. The technology is modular and proprietary. The context is a national AD infrastructure pipeline that is building site by site, deal by deal, across the industrial food processing landscape.

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Divert Opens Washington State Facility, Backed by Mitsubishi Series C, as Food Waste-to-RNG Model Scales

🇺🇸 United States | Waste Dive

Divert has opened its Integrated Diversion and Energy Facility in Longview, Washington, the first of its kind in the state, designed to process up to 100,000 tonnes of unsold and non-donatable food annually using high-recovery depackaging technology and anaerobic digestion. At full capacity, the facility will produce over 235,000 MMBtu of RNG annually through an interconnection agreement with Cascade Natural Gas, alongside 450,000 pounds of digestate fertiliser. The opening coincides with the announcement of a Series C funding round led by Mitsubishi Partners, valuing Divert at over $1 billion. As part of the partnership, Mitsubishi secured preferred offtake rights for RNG at future Divert facilities. Longview is Divert's second integrated depackaging and digestion site, following its Turlock, California plant in late 2024. The dual news, facility opening and billion-dollar valuation, is significant: it confirms that the vertically integrated food waste-to-RNG model, which combines retail network relationships, depackaging technology, and AD infrastructure under one operator, is now commercially validated and attracting institutional capital at scale.

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Pig Waste Biogas Pilot Transforms Daily Life for 20 Small Farmers in Pernambuco

🇧🇷 Brazil | Notícias Agrícolas

A pilot project in the Agreste Meridional region of Pernambuco has equipped 20 small pig farmers with biodigesters converting swine waste into biogas for cooking and biofertiliser for crops, funded by Sebrae-PE and the Agência de Desenvolvimento Econômico de Pernambuco at a total investment of R $327,000. Farmers report eliminating or significantly reducing their spending on bottled gas and charcoal, while digestate is being applied to crops including fodder palm and maize. One farmer describes a direct reinvestment loop: gas savings funding additional pig purchases, which produce more waste, which produces more gas. What this pilot demonstrates is not a technology story but an economics story at a scale that national biogas statistics routinely obscure: for small-scale agricultural producers, biogas is not an energy transition technology, it is a household economics intervention. The circularity is not theoretical; it is being lived.

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Tech, Science & Innovation

Syzygy’s Uruguay NovaSAF-1 Begins Design Phase, Advancing the World’s First Electrified Biogas-to-SAF Plant

🇺🇾 Uruguay | Bioenergy Insight

Syzygy Plasmonics has initiated front-end engineering and design for NovaSAF-1 in Durazno, Uruguay, the world's first fully electrified facility converting biogas into sustainable aviation fuel. The plant will use cow manure-derived biomethane and CO₂ from Estancias del Lago's dairy operations combined with Uruguay's near-100%-renewable electricity grid to produce over 350,000 gallons of ASTM-certified SAF annually, with a carbon intensity reduction exceeding 80% versus conventional Jet-A. A six-year offtake agreement covering 100% of production has been secured with Trafigura. Syzygy's process, using its proprietary light-driven Rigel Reactor, bypasses the expensive pre-processing steps that make most biogas-to-SAF pathways economically marginal, claiming yield rates more than 50% higher than conventional thermal biogas reforming. The FID is targeted for Q4 2026. What NovaSAF-1 represents is a genuinely new model for biogas asset economics: one that routes organic waste not into the gas grid but directly into one of the most commercially valuable and supply-constrained fuel markets on the planet. If it performs as designed, it becomes a replicable template for the 50,000+ biogas sites globally that currently lack a viable high-value output pathway.

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Biogas-to-Hydrogen Could Halve Production Costs Versus Electrolysis, Webinar Analysis Finds

🌍 Global | gasworld

Analysis presented at a recent industry webinar suggests that biogas-to-hydrogen production pathways could potentially halve costs relative to water electrolysis, positioning biogenic hydrogen as a materially competitive route at current technology and energy price configurations. This is a framing worth taking seriously. Green hydrogen via electrolysis has been the dominant narrative in the hydrogen transition, but cost trajectories have proven slower than projected, and electrolysis economics remain highly sensitive to renewable electricity prices. Biogas-to-hydrogen, which leverages existing feedstock streams and established AD infrastructure, does not carry the same electricity cost exposure. What the analysis points toward is a scenario in which the AD sector's existing asset base becomes an input for the hydrogen economy, not as a replacement for electrolysis, but as a cost-competitive parallel pathway serving different geographies and feedstock contexts. The conversation between biogas and hydrogen is becoming commercially relevant rather than merely theoretical.

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Life Cycle Research Confirms Anaerobic Digestion as the Optimal End-of-Life Route for Hemp Biocomposites

🇰🇷 South Korea | EurekAlert

Research published in the Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts, conducted by researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, has used full cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment to evaluate disposal options for hemp hurd-based biocomposite films, packaging and agricultural mulch materials designed as petroleum plastic substitutes. Among four end-of-life scenarios tested, anaerobic digestion delivered the lowest global warming potential: for every kilogram of mulch film treated, AD mitigated approximately 6.1 kg of CO₂ equivalent, with biogas converted to electricity and digestate reused as a soil conditioner. The finding is relevant well beyond hemp biocomposites. As bio-based materials proliferate across packaging and agricultural applications, the disposal pathway question becomes structurally important: the environmental case for these materials depends significantly on what happens to them at end-of-life. This research adds peer-reviewed weight to the argument that AD infrastructure is not just an energy asset, it is a critical material recovery system for the circular bioeconomy. The two are not separate value propositions. They are the same system.

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DOE Announces $20.2M for Mixed Algae Conversion Research, Extending the Biogas Feedstock Frontier

🇺🇸 United States | Department of Energy

The US Department of Energy's Bioenergy Technologies Office and Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management have announced $20.2 million in funding for 10 university and industry projects under the MACRO program, Mixed Algae Conversion Research Opportunity, targeting the conversion of seaweeds and other wet waste feedstocks into low-carbon fuels and bioproducts. The research specifically addresses the variability, chemical complexity, and storage instability of algal feedstocks that have historically limited their commercial viability in bioenergy applications. Two focus areas are covered: conversion of seaweeds to low-carbon fuels and bioproducts, and utilisation of CO₂ emissions from industrial facilities to grow algae for value-added agricultural outputs. What this funding signals is that the feedstock frontier of the broader biogas and renewable gas sector is being actively pushed beyond the well-established streams of agricultural residues, food waste, and wastewater. Algae and wet waste represent an abundant, currently underutilised resource category. If conversion challenges are resolved at research scale, the implications for national and global biomethane supply potential are significant.

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Expansion & Trends

Biogas Meets the Data Center Boom: Federal Tax Credits Are Reshaping the Clean Power Investment Case

🇺🇸 United States | JD Supra

Analysis from JD Supra examines how the updated Investment Tax Credit under Section 48E and Production Tax Credit under Section 45Y of the US Internal Revenue Code are reframing the economics of biogas-to-electricity for data center power applications. The convergence of two trends is doing the analytical work here: data centers require dispatchable, always-on baseload power that solar and wind cannot provide reliably, and biogas-to-electricity offers exactly that profile, continuous, grid-compatible, and increasingly cost-competitive at approximately $0.07 per kWh. The federal tax credit framework, when applied to biogas electricity generation, strengthens the investment case materially. This is not a theoretical application: AI-driven data center demand is already stressing grid capacity in key markets like Virginia, New Jersey, and Texas, where interconnection barriers have delayed solar and wind uptake. The combination of demand urgency, dispatchable power characteristics, and improved tax credit access is opening a new demand channel for biogas-to-power infrastructure that has not previously been available at this scale.

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Zambia's Nkhundye Community Biogas Project Demonstrates the Village-Scale Model in Practice

🇿🇲 Zambia | Mongabay

A biogas plant managed by the Nkhundye Community Cooperative in Zambia's Eastern Province is serving approximately 100 households, processing cattle dung from a communal kraal of around 300 head through a biodigester that produces methane for cooking, electricity for lighting and device charging, and energy for irrigation pumps supporting year-round vegetable production. The digestate, approximately 2.5 metric tonnes per week, is applied as organic fertiliser, creating a closed material loop across energy, water, and food production. The cooperative intends to expand from 100 to 600 households, with the kraal being scaled to 1,000 head of cattle to support increased production. The project was initially funded by German NGO support through NACRO, with ongoing technical assistance from ILO, UNDP, and UNICEF. Future funding pathways remain unclear, a recurring structural challenge for community-scale biogas that underlines what this month's exclusive essay addresses directly: the technology works; what is missing is the institutional architecture to sustain, verify, and finance it at the scale it is needed.

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Brazil's Underdeveloped Gas Pipeline Infrastructure Is the Primary Constraint on Biomethane Sector Growth

🇧🇷 Brazil | Fitch BMI

Fitch BMI analysis identifies underdeveloped gas pipeline infrastructure as the primary structural constraint on Brazil's biomethane sector growth trajectory, a counterintuitive finding given that Brazil closed 2025 with over 1,800 biogas plants and strong production growth. The constraint is not in production capacity but in distribution connectivity. Without grid access, biomethane produced at scale must be transported by road in cylinders, a logistics model that caps project economics and limits addressable markets. Brazil's Fuel for the Future legislation has established a biomethane blending mandate, starting at 1% of natural gas company emissions reductions in 2026, creating demand signals. But demand mandates without distribution infrastructure create a policy gap that feedstock availability and production capacity cannot close alone. This analysis, read alongside the PNGRB's grid injection guidelines just approved in India, is a useful comparative signal: both countries are at a similar inflection point in biomethane market formation, and both are discovering that the physical infrastructure layer is the binding constraint that policy ambition cannot substitute for.

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Evonik Partners with Malaysian Biogas Upgrader MTCO to Supply SEPURAN Membrane Technology Across Asia

🇩🇪 🇲🇾 Germany / Malaysia | Filtration & Separation

Evonik Industries has signed a large-scale agreement to supply its SEPURAN Green membrane technology to MTC Orec Sdn Bhd, a Malaysian biogas upgrading plant producer co-owned by VentureTECH, positioning the partnership as a platform for biogas upgrading expansion across Southeast Asia and beyond. Evonik's SEPURAN Green membranes, deployed in more than 2,000 upgrading plants globally, convert raw biogas into high-purity biomethane, including LNG-quality output, at relatively low energy consumption. MTCO specialises in designing and building upgrading plants and has stated ambitions to become the central hub for bioenergy infrastructure in Southeast Asia. What this partnership represents is the transfer of proven European upgrading technology into an underserved market at the moment when regional biogas feedstock and policy conditions are beginning to align. Southeast Asia's potential biogas resource base, agricultural residues, palm oil effluent, municipal waste, is enormous and largely uncaptured. Technology partnerships of this kind are how that resource base begins to become accessible infrastructure.

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

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What is becoming increasingly clear in biogas is not a problem of potential, but a phase shift in progress. Across regions, policies, and operating contexts, the sector is now actively building the institutional, operational, and commercial foundations that turn isolated projects into something closer to a functioning global market.

This month, across four continents and in conversations with practitioners at the sharp end of this industry, that shift became unusually visible. Not because of a single breakthrough, but because so many of the enabling layers, certification systems, trading infrastructure, operational standards, and carbon accounting frameworks started to stack in ways that make existing capacity more usable, more bankable, and more connected.

Again and again, whether the subject was plant performance in Europe, contracting gridlock in Australia, rural household systems in Bangladesh, or leadership capacity across the industry, the same theme emerged: biogas is no longer waiting on technology. It’s waiting on the systems around the technology.

The result is a sector where the question is less about whether biogas works, and more about how quickly the surrounding architecture can catch up with what already does.

The Diagnosis Everyone Shares

That point came through immediately in my conversation with Flávio Ascenco, Director and Co-Founder of Agile Biogas Engineering Consultants, who has spent his career inside the gap between plant ambition and plant reality across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. As one of the sector’s most clear-eyed diagnosticians of why plants fail to deliver what they were designed for. His assessment is precise rather than pessimistic. “Technology is never the limiting factor. Discipline is. Most failures weren’t because the kit was wrong, but because the basics weren’t being done consistently.”

That observation lands differently depending on where you sit. For a policy analyst watching the Czech Republic allocate €3.7 billion in state aid with explicit long-term operational support written into the framework, it’s a structural diagnosis. For an investor looking at a market where the distance between designed capacity and actual output is endemic and largely unreported, it’s a risk variable that isn’t being priced. Flávio’s conclusion follows directly: “If every plant had competent, accountable operators, the sector’s performance would improve overnight.” The word overnight isn’t rhetorical. It refers to potential that’s already installed, already funded, sitting in facilities across every major biogas market, waiting not for new technology or new capital but for the operational infrastructure that allows it to function at the level it was designed for.

Similar logic surfaced in my conversation with Levent, founder of Resource Loop and Head of Growth and Partnerships at Run Energy, brings 16 years of landfill gas and utility-scale bioenergy experience to a market that has every material precondition for growth and still can’t close at scale. His read on Australia is the most precise account of what institutional paralysis actually looks like from the inside. Feedstock owners won’t commit to 15-year supply contracts because they know the value of their organic waste streams is rising. Utilities need those contracts to make projects bankable. Neither party is wrong in their individual calculation. “Everyone is trying to understand where the value is and how it affects their business,” Levent says. The market is stuck precisely because both are right. What makes his perspective particularly valuable is his refusal to paper over the price dynamics that make this market structurally different from Europe. “Gas is pretty cheap here. If they can get it cheap enough, they’ll use it. But if it’s not cheaper than normal gas, many won’t look at it. You have to call it out; if you aren’t realising that truth, you’re never going to make the sale.” An industry that can’t accurately describe its own commercial constraints to itself can’t close them.

What April’s Headlines Measured

Against that diagnostic backdrop, the procedural developments of this month take on a different character than their individual press releases suggest.

Ireland and Portugal issued their first Guarantees of Origin for biomethane. Lithuania joined the ERGaR Hub, opening cross-border certificate trading with Germany, Denmark, and Slovakia. In the first two months of 2026 alone, Lithuania had issued more than 60 GWh of guarantees of origin. A 2.4-fold increase in the same period in 2025. That production growth was commercially inert without the trading infrastructure to make it marketable. The ERGaR connection doesn’t change the volume. It changes the addressable market by an order of magnitude. Scotland launched the only PAS110-certified digestate testing service of its kind in the country, changing the economics of existing biogas operations without a single new plant being built, because the asset was always there, and the institutional layer to make it valuable was not.

Norway’s Inherit Carbon Solutions, in collaboration with HoopCO2 and Northern Lights JV, entered operation with the world’s first project to capture biogenic CO2 from a biogas plant and permanently store it in a sub-seabed geological reservoir. This isn’t a demonstration of ambition. It’s the operational proof of a full carbon value chain that has, until now, existed only in project proposals. BECCS for biogas was a theoretical value proposition layered on top of economics that were already uncertain in many markets. After Norway, it’s demonstrated. Every carbon credit methodology that will eventually be written to capture that value now has a verified operational precedent to build on. The ceiling on what a biogas facility can deliver, economically and climatologically, just moved.

None of these are stories about gas production. They’re stories about the construction of the conditions under which gas production graduates from a collection of projects into a functioning market. Certification, standards, testing, carbon accounting, cross-border traceability. Each one closes a specific gap that has been allowing the sector to defer the harder question of whether it’s building something durable.

The Geography of the Same Problem

The consistency of this pattern across geographies is what makes April analytically significant. Germany’s EnviTec warned that proposed EEG restructuring fails to account for a 25 to 30% rise in operational costs since 2024, a precise example of policy designed for the economics of building, missing the economics of operating. Ireland’s domestic biomethane multiplier was blocked by the European Commission on internal market grounds, revealing the structural tension between national deployment ambition and EU single market rules that Ireland hit first but won’t hit last. In the US, the USDA’s extended funding pause on CAFO-linked digesters signals that legitimacy. The sector’s social and political licence to operate is now a structural constraint that capital and technology can’t resolve.

At a completely different scale, the same issue appeared in Bangladesh, where Md. Ashrafuzzaman Ashraf, founder of Greenway Renewable Energy Implementation Organisation (GREIO) and the driving force behind over 4,000 household biogas systems installed across 27 districts of Bangladesh, operates at the furthest remove from these institutional debates and yet articulates the same underlying problem with uncommon clarity. “What we’re trying to solve is not just an energy issue or an agricultural issue in isolation. It’s about transforming how rural households manage energy, waste, and farming systems together.” The technology functions. The impact on indoor air quality, household economics, and soil health is measurable. What limits scale is the absence of carbon credit mechanisms capable of aggregating and verifying emissions reductions across thousands of geographically dispersed small systems at a cost that makes the exercise viable. “If carbon credit systems were fully functional and accessible,” Ashraf says, “scaling household biogas projects over the next decade could be transformative.” From the Padma floodplain to the sub-seabed of the North Sea, the constraint is always the same: institutional infrastructure that hasn’t yet caught up with what the technology can do.

The Room Where This Gets Built

The leadership side of the same structural question emerged in my interview with Simona Amerio. Recipient of the EBA SheLeads Award 2025, and the executive responsible for embedding sustainability, energy regulatory strategy, and ISO systems into operations at Ferrero across two decades, names the gap with precision: “It’s not a diversity issue. It’s a performance failure. Without women, innovation slows, foresight is narrowed, and the speed required for the energy transition falters.”

The World Biogas Association’s 2024 survey puts women at 28% of the workforce and 24% of senior management. 11% percent of organisations have achieved anything approaching leadership parity. 93% of respondents believe diversity has a positive impact on business performance.

The 82-point gap between believing diversity matters and structurally building it is the same category of problem as every other one this piece has traced. It’s the distance between knowing and doing. Simona’s framing of her own practice is instructive here. “I stopped adapting to the room and started shaping it.” That move, from accommodation to authorship, is precisely the posture the institutional construction phase demands. The certification frameworks, the carbon methodologies, the contract templates that make markets legible: these aren’t inherited. They’re written. “The next era of biogas and the energy transition will be led by those who challenge assumptions, not those who preserve them.” That’s not aspiration. That’s a description of how markets actually get built, by people who decide the room needs to change and act accordingly.

What this month revealed, taken in full, is that the biogas sector has entered a phase of institutional construction that’s harder to narrate than project announcements but more consequential for long-term trajectory. The capital is real. The technology is proven. The feedstock is there. The gap that has always been the story, between what this sector knows and what it’s built, is generating a visible record of being closed.

That’s the work that makes everything else last.

Every day, households, farms, and industries generate organic waste as a byproduct of simply existing.

Food scraps, agricultural residues, wastewater sludge, things we’ve been conditioned to discard.

But through #anaerobicdigestion, these materials become #biogas and nutrient-rich fertilizers.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has repeatedly highlighted biogas and #biomethane as critical, scalable solutions for decarbonizing energy systems.

Especially because they leverage existing waste streams rather than requiring entirely new inputs.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Environment Programme emphasizes that organic waste in landfills is a major source of methane emissions, and that capturing it through anaerobic digestion is one of the fastest ways to reduce climate impact.

The same material contributing to emissions today could be powering homes, fueling transport, and regenerating soils tomorrow.

Even The World Bank Group has pointed to organic waste as a largely untapped economic resource, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions where waste volumes are growing exponentially.

So, this isn’t just a “biogas conversation.”

It’s an infrastructure conversation.

A climate conversation.

A food system conversation.

An economic opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Because waste isn’t a burden, it’s a resource we’ve underestimated for far too long.

And the scale? Enormous.

If you want to stay ahead of where this space is going. From policy shifts to project developments to the bigger systemic trends, follow the audio version of the We Are Biogas Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

Every week, we break down what’s happening in biogas (and why it matters far beyond the industry).

The opportunity is already here.

The question is: who’s paying attention?

From Brazil’s rapid rise as a biomethane powerhouse to Ukraine’s 2035 export strategy, Ireland’s €80 million project launch, and Australia’s growing renewable gas momentum — the industry is moving from ambition to execution.

In this episode, we cover:

• Brazil closes 2025 with 1,803 biogas plants and rising biomethane output

• Ukraine launches a national biomethane roadmap aligned with EU markets

• Ireland breaks ground on a major Cork facility amid policy tensions

• Sweden unlocks stranded LNG capacity with critical pipeline infrastructure

• Anaergia expands RNG deployment in the United States

• Cuba launches its first biomethane transport fuel project

• Australia updates national gas standards to formally recognise biomethane

• China scales circular agriculture with pipeline-injected renewable gas

• Canada pilots breakthrough landfill gas upgrading technology

• Lithuania expands renewable gas certificate trading across Europe

Exclusive Interview:
Alexandra speaks with Levent Hilmi, Founder of Resource Loop and Head of Growth & Partnerships at Run Energy, for a deep dive into Australia’s emerging biomethane market.

They discuss:

• Why Australia may become one of the most important new biomethane markets

• Feedstock bottlenecks and project bankability

• Grid injection vs behind-the-meter energy use

• Why cheap fossil gas remains a challenge

• The 3–5 year horizon for Australia’s project boom

• Lessons from Europe and North America

If you work in renewable gas, energy transition, waste-to-energy, agriculture, utilities, climate tech, or infrastructure investment — this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Subscribe to We Are Biogas for weekly global coverage of biogas, biomethane, RNG, and the circular economy.

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We Are Biogas Exclusive

Inside Australia’s Biomethane “Moment”: A Market Finding Its Shape

By Alexandra Arndt · April 27

What’s unfolding in Australia is dynamic, fast-moving, and full of opportunity as key players figure out where the real value lies. At the center of the conversation is Levent Hilmi, Founder of Resource Loop, Head of Growth and Partnerships at Run Energy, and a veteran with 16 years of experience in landfill gas, utility-scale bioenergy, and international technology consultancy. The analysis reveals a market defined by a sophisticated jostling for value: on one side, large-scale utility operators like Jemena and AusNet, who face stranded asset risk as electrification accelerates and are pushing biomethane injection as a defensive necessity. On the other, feedstock owners, abattoirs, food processors, and agricultural hubs — weighing whether to sell gas to the grid or use it behind the meter to offset their own carbon footprints. The bankability of long-term feedstock contracts remains the critical bottleneck. Australia’s second-mover advantage is real: it can adopt proven, de-risked systems developed in Europe and North America. The “moment” is here, but it remains delicate, dependent on regulatory reform around digestate, feedstock logistics, and the persistent challenge of competing with historically low conventional gas prices.

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Policy & Capital

Brazil Crosses 1,800 Biogas Plants as Scale and Efficiency Define the Next Phase

🇧🇷 Brazil | Petronotícias

Brazil closed 2025 with 1,803 registered biogas plants and production approaching 5 billion Nm³ per year, with a 5% increase in the number of units and a 6% rise in volume produced year-over-year, according to data from CIBiogás. What the numbers reveal is a market maturing beyond simple expansion: fewer new plants are entering per year, but those coming online are larger and more productive. The distribution of production remains concentrated. São Paulo alone accounts for approximately 4.9 million Nm³ per day, but Paraná and Minas Gerais are growing above the national average, and the North and Northeast remain significantly underexploited. The more strategically important signal is the shift in end use: electricity generation still dominates at approximately 62%, but biomethane now accounts for roughly 34% of total volume despite representing a smaller share of plant count. This reflects a deliberate commercial upgrade in the sector's trajectory, with biomethane being routed toward gas markets and transport rather than simply grid power.

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Ukraine Formalizes Its Biomethane Ambitions with a Government-Backed Programme Through 2035

🇺🇦 Ukraine | CEE Energy News

Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers has approved a national Biomethane Production Development Programme running through 2035, targeting 1 billion cubic metres of output per year by 2030 and 2.1 billion cubic metres by 2035. The program provides for new plant construction, modernization of existing biogas infrastructure, investment incentives, and deregulation of grid connection procedures. Eight biomethane plants are slated for commissioning in the first implementation phase. The deeper strategic signal here is the EU alignment pathway embedded in the program: this year Ukraine plans to gain access to the EU renewable fuels database, initiate a mutual recognition agreement for guarantees of origin, and approve new natural gas quality rules. This is an accelerated bid for biomethane export status to the EU, positioned explicitly as a mechanism to reduce European dependence on Russian hydrocarbons. The infrastructure, the feedstock base, and the political motivation are all present. What this program attempts to supply is the institutional framework to match.

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Ireland's €80M Cork Plant Presses Forward as the EU Blocks a Key Support Mechanism

🇮🇪 Ireland | gasworld

Stream BioEnergy has broken ground on an €80 million biomethane facility in Little Island, Cork. Backed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Pioneer Infrastructure Partners, even as the European Commission issued a formal detailed opinion blocking the domestic biomethane multiplier under Ireland's proposed Renewable Heat Obligation. The multiplier would have allowed one unit of Irish-produced biomethane to count as 1.5 units toward compliance, favoring domestic supply. The Commission found this incompatible with EU internal market rules. The Irish Bioenergy Association has called 2026 a "make-or-break year" for the sector. What this situation illustrates is a structural tension between national biomethane strategies and EU single market rules that Ireland is the first to hit at scale, but is unlikely to be the last. The Cork project's progress signals that well-capitalized, fully contracted projects can absorb regulatory uncertainty. Smaller or earlier-stage developers without secured offtake agreements are far more exposed. The Irish government has separately signalled a €200 million biomethane capital grant scheme later this year, which may provide an alternative pathway if the RHO framework continues to stall.

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Project Spotlights

Stockholm Pipeline Inauguration More Than Doubles Liquefied Biogas Capacity in Huddinge

🇸🇪 Sweden | Renewable Energy Magazine

St1 Biokraft has inaugurated a new gas pipeline connecting its Henriksdal and Gladö Kvarn facilities via Stockholm's gas network. Two years in construction, supported by Sweden's Klimatklivet environmental investment program. The Gladö Kvarn LBG upgrading unit, completed in late 2023 and designed for 240 GWh output, had been operating below its potential due to the absence of a grid connection. That constraint has now been removed. The pipeline unlocks existing production at Henriksdal, which could only produce compressed biogas, by routing it to Gladö Kvarn for liquefaction, more than doubling the facility's LBG output. This is an infrastructure completion story more than a new build story. The capital was already deployed; the bottleneck was a missing grid link. It raises a question worth tracking more broadly: across the European biomethane landscape, how much existing or partially deployed capacity is constrained by analogous integration gaps rather than production limitations? Solving for the connection layer, not just the plant layer, is increasingly where the value unlock is occurring.

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Anaergia and Vanguard Renewables Deepen Partnership with Fourth Minnesota RNG Deployment

🇺🇸 United States | Renewables Now

Anaergia has signed a $5.85 million contract with Vanguard Renewables for its fourth consecutive technology deployment. This time for an advanced anaerobic digestion facility in Minnesota processing food, beverage, and agricultural waste for RNG injection into the local energy distribution system. The agreement covers Anaergia's process technology, proprietary mixers, and its biogas upgrading system. The fourth deployment in a repeated partnership is analytically significant: it reflects a technology selection process that has already been validated three times. Repeated contracts between the same technology provider and developer are an indicator of operational confidence, not just commercial convenience. In an industry where technology risk remains a meaningful variable in project financing conversations, the accumulation of successful deployments in the same pairing reduces uncertainty for future capital deployment. This is how sector-level trust in specific technology stacks gets built.

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Cuba's First Biomethane Plant Enters Final Assembly, Targets Bus Fuelling and Power Generation

🇨🇺 Cuba | Power Magazine

Cuba's state oil company Cupet has announced that the country's first biomethane plant, located in Martí, Matanzas province, has entered its final assembly and production phase. The facility, developed under EU funding through the UNDP and coordinated with Spain-based technical specialists from GEcrio, processes biogas from nearby pig farm biodigesters located 5–9 km away, producing approximately 40 kg of purified biomethane per hour at a compressed pressure of 200 bar. The output is designed to fuel five urban buses and two vans. With a combined range of 300–400 km per fill. While a secondary electricity generation function operates on less-purified gas. The plant represents something materially different from most of the headlines in this roundup: biomethane being deployed not as a grid-injection or export product, but as direct mobility infrastructure in an energy-constrained economy. The feedstock dependency on pig farming volumes, currently under pressure from food scarcity, is a real operational risk the article candidly acknowledges. But the model; small-scale, locally sourced, transport-integrated, is one that has relevance well beyond Cuba's particular circumstances.

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Tech, Science & Innovation

Australian Researchers Solve a Critical Scaling Barrier for Biomethane Grid Injection

🇦🇺 Australia | EurekAlert

Research led by Professor Mohsen Talei at the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology has identified the critical specifications for safe and effective biomethane quality at scale. Directly informing the updated Australian Standard AS 4564-2025, which now formally recognises biomethane as a natural gas equivalent and introduces new contaminant limits. The specific technical problem solved relates to siloxane, a compound found in household products that, when burned in biomethane, leaves a glass-like coating on appliances, degrading performance. The team developed a predictive framework, combining simulation and experimental data, to determine how much siloxane can be present for appliances to run reliably, even at concentrations too low to study experimentally directly. This kind of research removes the barriers that stop regulatory frameworks from approving network-scale deployment. The updated standard now gives distributors, manufacturers, and regulators a shared technical foundation to work from. Australia's Malabar Biomethane Facility has already proven injection is possible; this research clarifies what responsible injection looks like at national scale.

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Australian Meat Processor Begins Construction of AD Facility Targeting 35,000 Tonnes of Annual Emissions Reductions

🇦🇺 Australia | Bioenergy Insight

Casino Food Co has begun construction of the Casino Biohub, an anaerobic digestion facility at its beef processing operations in northern New South Wales. Developed in partnership with LMS Energy. The facility will include a 50 million litre covered anaerobic lagoon and a biogas flare, treating abattoir effluent that would otherwise vent directly to atmosphere. In the first stage, captured methane will be flared. A second stage is planned to convert biogas into electricity for on-site use. At full commissioning, the project is expected to reduce emissions by approximately 35,000 tonnes of carbon equivalent annually. Roughly equivalent to removing 11,200 cars from the road, and eliminate over 98% of the facility's Scope 1 emissions associated with effluent treatment. This is an important structural story for the Australian market: utility-scale grid injection project, and industrial emissions abatement deployed directly at the point of production. The combination of a University of Melbourne research breakthrough on biomethane standards (above) and this ground-level infrastructure activity illustrates the dual-track nature of Australia's biomethane development. Scientific and commercial, progressing in parallel.

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Expansion & Trends

Lithuania Joins European ERGaR Hub, Opening Cross-Border Biomethane Certificate Trading

🇱🇹 Lithuania | CEE Energy News

Amber Grid, Lithuania's gas transmission operator, has joined the ERGaR Hub, the European Renewable Gas Registry platform enabling secure cross-border exchange of guarantees of origin for biomethane. With this integration, Lithuanian producers can now transfer guarantees of origin electronically to Germany, Denmark, and Slovakia. The timing coincides with significant domestic growth: at the start of 2026, Lithuania had 12 operational biomethane plants with a combined capacity of 67 MW, and in January–February alone more than 60 GWh of guarantees of origin were issued. A 2.4-fold increase over the same period in 2025. What this signals is the transition from production to marketability. Growing biomethane volumes are commercially inert without the certificate infrastructure to make them tradeable across borders. By joining ERGaR, Lithuania converts its production growth into market access, directly reaching Germany, the largest biomethane demand market in Europe. This is certificate infrastructure as commercial enablement, and its replication across smaller EU biomethane markets will be a necessary precondition for the cross-border market to function at the scale European policy targets assume.

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Shanghai's Songlin Farm Demonstrates a Fully Closed-Loop Pig Waste-to-Biomethane Model

🇨🇳 China | China Daily

A large-scale pig farm on the outskirts of Shanghai is operating what China Daily describes as a 100% waste conversion system: the Songlin Ecological Agricultural Zone in Jinshan district processes approximately 100,000 metric tonnes of pig waste annually from roughly 80,000 hogs, producing 3.65 million cubic metres of biogas per year. Surplus biogas is purified into biomethane and injected into Shanghai's urban gas pipeline network, the first agricultural project to achieve this in the city. The biogas slurry fertilises 867 hectares of nearby farmland, saving an estimated 2 million yuan in fertiliser costs annually, while CO₂ produced during purification is redirected as gaseous fertiliser for on-site vegetables, reportedly increasing yields by around 20%. What makes this model analytically interesting is the degree of integration: energy, fertiliser, and food production are not separate outputs linked by policy incentives but outputs of a single engineered cycle. The closed-loop framing, where nothing leaves the system as waste, is the direction the global biogas sector is moving. China is doing it at operational scale.

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Finnish Cleantech Pilot at German Biogas Site Targets Nutrient Recovery as a Structural Industry Advancement

🇫🇮 Finland / 🇩🇪 Germany | The Chemical Engineer

NPHarvest, a Finnish cleantech company specialising in nutrient recovery from waste streams, has launched a pilot plant at Biogas Westerbakum GmbH & Co KG in Saxony, Germany, processing up to 20 m³ per day of liquid digestate to recover nitrogen and phosphorus, two key fertiliser inputs. The company's membrane-based system claims up to 90% capture efficiency for both compounds in a single modular, plug-in unit designed for integration into existing large-scale biogas plants. The outputs, ammonium sulfate and calcium phosphate, are direct fertiliser inputs, not intermediates requiring further processing. This enters the newsletter at a moment when EU nitrogen regulation is tightening across member states, and Germany, as Europe's largest biogas producer, is acutely exposed to the regulatory and commercial pressure around digestate management. If that framing holds commercially, it repositions digestate from a compliance cost to a value stream, which changes the economics of existing biogas operations without requiring new infrastructure.

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Hydron Energy's MOF-Based Upgrading Technology Targets the Underserved Economics of Small Landfill Gas Projects

🇨🇦 Canada | Bioenergy Insight

Hydron Energy has launched a pilot Renewable Natural Gas project at the Bailey Landfill in Chilliwack, British Columbia, in collaboration with FortisBC and the City of Chilliwack, with up to C$2.3 million in funding from the NRC IRAP Clean Technology initiative. The project centres on Hydron's INTRUPTor system, a single-stage biogas upgrading platform using a novel metal organic framework (MOF) to remove both nitrogen and CO₂ simultaneously at ambient pressure. Conventional landfill gas upgrading is technically demanding precisely because of elevated nitrogen concentrations, which require higher operating pressures and multi-stage processing that typically make smaller sites economically unviable. If Hydron's single-stage approach performs as described, it changes the minimum viable scale equation for landfill biogas upgrading, opening a resource category that is globally abundant but commercially stranded. This is a technology validation project, not a commercial deployment, and the distinction matters: the claim is significant, but the proof will come from operational data. The Chilliwack pilot is the mechanism by which that proof gets generated.

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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

In the global energy landscape, few transitions are as analytically complex or as geographically significant as the one currently unfolding across the Australian continent. For decades, Australia has been defined by its vast fossil fuel reserves and its role as a primary energy exporter. But beneath the surface of its industrial sectors, from the intensive livestock operations of the Riverina to the wastewater networks of its coastal cities, a different kind of resource is being revalued.

This is Australia’s biomethane moment, a pivotal juncture where organic waste is being reframed as a strategic energy asset. To understand the gravity of this shift, I spoke with Levent Hilmi, Founder of Resource Loop, a member of the Victorian Bioenergy Network, Head of Growth and partnerships at Run Energy and a veteran with 16 years of experience in landfill gas, utility-scale bioenergy, and international technology consultancy. Levent offers a ground-level perspective on the transition from traditional gas capture to the modern anaerobic digestion (AD) systems now beginning to dot the Australian landscape.

The Methane Mandate

The driver for this transformation is found in the rigorous accounting of national emissions. Methane is a potent climate lever; it possesses a global warming potential over 27 times that of carbon dioxide on a 100-year scale. For a nation committed to Net Zero by 2050, capturing these fugitive emissions is no longer optional; it’s an economic and regulatory necessity.

According to the latest Quarterly Update of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, methane accounts for a significant portion of the national footprint. The agriculture sector remains a dominant contributor, with methane and nitrous oxide from manure management representing nearly 10% of total agricultural emissions. Meanwhile, the waste sector, encompassing landfills and wastewater, contributes approximately 3% of national emissions, a figure that hides the concentrated potential of urban and industrial organic streams.

A Market in Tension

The current Australian landscape is defined by a sophisticated jostling for value. On one side are the large-scale utility operators like Jemena and AusNet, who manage billions of dollars in gas infrastructure. With the national push toward electrification, these companies face the threat of stranded assets. For them, injecting biomethane into the grid is a defensive necessity to keep their pipelines relevant in a decarbonized future.

On the other side are the feedstock owners, large-scale abattoirs, food processors, waste management companies and agricultural hubs. These entities are primary energy users themselves, often requiring immense amounts of process heat. Their analytical dilemma is whether to sell their gas to the grid or use it “behind the meter” to offset their own carbon footprints and energy costs.

There’s a bit of a pull between the behind-the-meter play and the big pipeline operators," Levent explains. "Everyone is trying to understand where the value is and how it affects their business. Network operators are nervous because the country is trying to electrify, so they are pushing feedstock owners to move into the biomethane space."

The Feedstock Bottleneck

Despite the momentum, a critical bottleneck remains: the bankability of long-term feedstock contracts. In a market where landfilling is still relatively inexpensive in certain jurisdictions, and where the value of organic waste is expected to surge in the next five years, large waste management firms like Cleanaway and Veolia are often hesitant to commit to 15-year supply agreements.

“They understand they own the feedstock and the logistics, and they know the value is coming,” Levent notes. “So they won’t commit to long-term contracts just in case the value increases. It’s hard to get a bankable project because you can’t find long-term feedstock supply.”

This tension is compounded by the “cheap gas” reality. Unlike Europe, where biomethane is heavily subsidized or benefits from high carbon pricing, Australian biomethane must compete with historically low conventional gas prices. Levent is blunt about the industrial reality: “Gas is pretty cheap here. If they can get [biomethane] cheap enough, they’ll use it. But if it’s not cheaper than normal gas, many won’t look at it. You have to call it out; if you aren’t realizing that truth, you’re never going to make the sale.”

Learning from the Global Blueprint

Australia possesses a distinct "second-mover advantage." By entering the biomethane race after decades of technological optimization in Europe and North America, Australian developers can adopt proven, de-risked systems. Projects like the Malabar Biomethane Injection Plant in Sydney, the first to inject renewable gas into the Australian network, are serving as the blueprint Levent describes. New players are entering the field with significant pipelines: Delorean Corporation is progressing its SA1 Salisbury facility; Valorify has 13.5 PJ of biomethane in its project pipeline from agricultural residues; and international capital from Canada and Singapore is beginning to flow through firms like Anaergia.

The Social Bridge: Why It Matters to Communities

Beyond the industrial spreadsheets, the biomethane moment carries profound implications for land stewardship. In regional Australia, wastewater from food processing is often stored in massive lagoons, left to evaporate and vent methane into the atmosphere. This is a missed opportunity for resource recovery and a risk to future land health. “We’ve been to facilities where they’re just letting it evaporate with no control,” Levent says.

“There’s a big opportunity not just to offset emissions, but to stop contaminating the land we’re going to use for the next hundred years. No one is really thinking about the next generation. We need to show the younger students where and how we can improve. Just because it’s not perfect now, you don't hide it. You show people and look for help."

The Three-to-Five-Year Horizon

The consensus among authorities like Levent is that while the current year is defined by "talk and tenders," the physical boom is on the near horizon. The next 12 months will likely see a wave of Final Investment Decisions (FIDs), with a three-to-five-year window for these projects to come fully online. The "moment" in Australia is real, but it remains delicate. It requires the government to reduce "red tape," particularly regarding the regulation of digestate (the nutrient-rich byproduct of AD) and the logistics of feedstock hubs. But as Levent suggests, the facts are moving faster than the policy. The industry is no longer waiting for permission; it’s building the infrastructure of a circular economy, one PJ at a time.

To connect with Levent Hilmi, reach out to him at leventhilmi@resourceloop.com.au

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