MRL LFG Abatement Project

MRL LFG Abatement Project is an electricity generation from landfill gas project located at the Melbourne Regional Landfill in Ravenhall and Deer Park, approximately 20km west of the Melbourne CBD in Victoria. It was registered in January 2013. While an exact spatial area in hectares is not specified, the project boundaries cover the active and legacy waste cells of the major municipal landfill site.

Electricity generation from landfill gas projects involve the installation of a gas collection system to capture methane produced by decomposing organic matter. Standard requirements for this methodology include actively extracting the gas, accurately metering its volume and methane concentration, and combusting it to generate electricity. This process effectively converts and destroys the methane, which has a significantly higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide.

The Deer Park and Ravenhall region is historically known for agricultural grazing but is now heavily characterised by industrial operations, large-scale basalt quarrying, waste management, and rapidly expanding residential growth corridors. Located in a local rain shadow, the environment experiences a relatively low-to-moderate semi-arid to temperate annual rainfall of approximately 400 to 500mm. The typical soils in this area of the Victorian Volcanic Plain are heavy, naturally cracking basaltic clays that can be prone to sodicity.

The project was originally registered under the name "Boral Deer Park Biogas Energy Project". In early 2015, the landfill operations were acquired from Boral by Landfill Operations Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of the Cleanaway Group, prompting a change in the project name. Transitioning over the years from revoked legacy methodologies to newer standards, the project has been highly productive over its lifespan. It successfully fulfilled a Commonwealth fixed-delivery carbon contract in November 2017, delivering a total of 494,858 tonnes of verified abatement.