Darwin Landfill Gas Project

Darwin Landfill Gas Project is an electricity generation from landfill gas project located at the Shoal Bay Waste Management Facility, approximately 15km north-east of Darwin in the Northern Territory. It was registered in August 2012 and covers the operational footprint of the local landfill site.

Electricity generation from landfill gas projects involve installing a collection system to capture methane-rich biogas emitted by decomposing legacy and non-legacy organic waste. The captured gas is then combusted in a generator to produce baseload renewable electricity, significantly reducing the amount of harmful greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.

The Darwin area is known for its urban fringes and surrounding tropical coastal ecosystems. The area features a tropical savanna climate with high monsoonal rainfall during the wet season, and soils in the region are generally shallow lateritic, sandy, and clay loams.

This project transitioned from a revoked Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) method and continues to operate under the current 2021 methodology determination. Operated by bioenergy market leaders LMS Energy Pty Ltd, the site features a 1.1-megawatt biogas-to-energy plant that was a pioneering facility for Australia's tropical north. The project has exclusive rights to the site's landfill gas until 2034, generates enough renewable energy to power approximately 1,400 local homes, and successfully completed a major Commonwealth carbon abatement contract (CAC783640) in April 2022.