Shoalhaven Landfill Gas Abatement Facility (Revoked)

Shoalhaven Landfill Gas Abatement Facility (Revoked) is a landfill gas project located at the West Nowra Recycling and Waste Depot in Mundamia, approximately 5km west of Nowra in New South Wales. Registered in August 2013, the project was situated within a 14.5-hectare waste processing site surrounded by native bushland. The broader Shoalhaven region features a mix of coastal environments, state forests, and agricultural land uses such as dairy farming.

Landfill gas projects under the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme involve installing or maintaining a gas collection system to capture methane emissions from decomposing legacy and non-legacy organic waste. Standard methodology requirements dictate that the captured methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, must be safely combusted using flares or converted into energy using electricity generators, thereby preventing it from entering the atmosphere.

The local environment around Nowra experiences a temperate, oceanic climate with moderately warm, humid summers, mild winters, and relatively consistent coastal rainfall. The soils in this specific area are predominantly Tenosols, Kurosols, and Dermosols, often featuring shallow, sandy and silty profiles derived from the local Nowra Sandstone and Wandrawandian Siltstone geologies.

This project transitioned through varying methodologies and saw participant changes, such as a shift from AGL Energy Services to the Shoalhaven City Council, before being formally revoked under section 29 of the CFI Rule in February 2021. Prior to its revocation, the site featured 55 extraction wells dug up to 15 metres deep into the landfill. Connected by over three kilometres of piping, the captured gas was fed into a 1.1 MW Deutz engine to generate continuous clean electricity for the local grid. The West Nowra facility remains highly innovative; it recently adopted an Australian-first Surface Active Foam Fractionation (SAFF) technology to successfully remove PFAS contaminants from the landfill's leachate.