Buderim Landfill Gas Project

Buderim Landfill Gas Project is a landfill gas capture and combustion project located at Buderim, an urban centre on the Sunshine Coast approximately 5 kilometres inland from Maroochydore and 95km north of Brisbane in Queensland. Registered in August 2012, the project operates in a region historically renowned for intensive agriculture such as ginger and sugar cane, but today is characterised predominantly by residential, mixed-use, and peri-urban land developments. The area experiences a humid subtropical climate with high year-round rainfall and is famous for its rich, highly fertile red volcanic soils known as ferrosols.

Landfill gas projects involve installing a gas collection system to capture methane generated by the decomposition of organic waste in a landfill. Under the methodology's standard requirements, the captured methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, must be combusted. This is typically done using environmental flares or electricity generators, which converts the methane into carbon dioxide and water, thereby significantly reducing the global warming potential of the emissions.

This specific project captures and combusts gas generated at the landfill from both legacy and non-legacy waste. It transitioned from a revoked Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) method in 2015 and was varied again in 2021 under the current Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative-Landfill Gas) Methodology Determination 2015 (Compilation No. 1). A notable milestone for the project is that it secured a fixed-delivery contract (CAC164941) with the Clean Energy Regulator at the April 2015 auction; this contract has now been successfully completed, delivering a total of 385,393 Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) to the Commonwealth. The project proponent, LMS Energy Pty Ltd, is a major Australian bioenergy company that manages multiple similar landfill gas abatement facilities across the country.