City of Armadale Landfill Gas Flaring Project

City of Armadale Landfill Gas Flaring Project is a landfill gas flaring project located at the Hopkinson Road Refuse Site in the suburb of Hilbert, approximately 5km southwest of the Armadale town center and 30km southeast of Perth, Western Australia. It was registered in July 2014. While the exact project area size is not published, it operates directly within the footprint of the City of Armadale's municipal landfill and recycling facility.

Landfill gas projects involve the capture and combustion of methane generated by the decomposition of organic matter within a landfill. Standard requirements for this methodology dictate the installation of a flaring system to destroy the methane, preventing this highly potent greenhouse gas from venting into the atmosphere. The volume of methane captured and combusted is monitored and quantified to calculate the baseline emissions that would have occurred otherwise.

The Armadale and Hilbert area sits on the Swan Coastal Plain, an urban fringe region transitioning from historic rural and agricultural land into residential estates, light industry, and waste management infrastructure. The region experiences a Mediterranean climate characterized by hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters, with a relatively high average annual rainfall of approximately 800-820mm. The local soils are predominantly deep, infertile Bassendean sands and coastal alluvial deposits, which lack organic matter and are often highly water-repellent at the surface.

Interestingly, this project has evolved through several methodological phases. It originally transitioned from the revoked Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) 2012 method to the 2015 Landfill Gas methodology in June 2017, and later to Compilation No. 1 in January 2022, allowing it to legally capture and combust gas from both legacy and non-legacy waste. The project was contracted under the Emissions Reduction Fund in April 2015, and its specific delivery contract (CAC393085) was completed in December 2021. Furthermore, the greenhouse gas abatement achieved by this flaring project has been historically utilized by the City of Armadale to offset emissions from its own municipal operations, effectively reducing the local government's overall carbon footprint.