Drysdale Landfill Gas Project

Drysdale Landfill Gas Project is an electricity generation from landfill gas project located at Drysdale, approximately 16km east of Geelong on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria. It was registered in February 2013 and covers an unspecified area within the footprint of the local municipal waste management facility.

Landfill gas electricity generation projects involve installing a network of extraction wells and pipes to capture methane gas generated by the decomposition of organic waste in an oxygen-poor environment. A standard requirement of this methodology is the destruction of this captured methane, typically by combusting it in a gas engine or generator to produce renewable electricity. This converts potent methane into less harmful carbon dioxide and displaces fossil fuel electricity generation on the power grid.

The Drysdale and wider Bellarine Peninsula area is historically known for agricultural land uses such as livestock grazing, cropping, and orchards, operating alongside rapidly growing residential areas. The area is considered to have a temperate climate with moderate rainfall, and local soils generally consist of sandy loams, duplex clays, and localized basaltic soils.

This project is a collaborative partnership between the proponent, LMS Energy, and the City of Greater Geelong, operating at what is locally known as the Drysdale Renewable Energy Facility. In 2018, LMS Energy upgraded the site with a 1.1MW biogas engine that generates roughly 8,500 MWh of renewable electricity annually. This is enough to power approximately 1,500 local homes and abate around 50,900 tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. The project has transitioned through various revoked scheme methodologies to consistently capture gas from both legacy and non-legacy waste, and it successfully completed a grouped Carbon Abatement Contract (CAC164941) with the Commonwealth in October 2021 after delivering over 385,000 tonnes of collective emissions abatement.