Before the Market Can Move, We Have to Build the Floor
A month inside the systems, signals, and constraints shaping the global biogas market.
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.
We Are Biogas is a weekly publication covering the global biogas, biomethane, RNG, and anaerobic digestion landscape. To be featured or to get in touch: alexandra@wearebiogas.com