Copping Landfill Gas Project

Copping Landfill Gas Project is an electricity generation from landfill gas project located at Copping, approximately 40 kilometres east of Hobart in Tasmania. It was registered in December 2013 and operates within the Copping Refuse Disposal Site, a major regional waste management facility. While the exact project area size is unspecified in the public registry, it encompasses the gas collection and power generation infrastructure spanning the active and legacy waste cells of the landfill.

Electricity generation from landfill gas projects involve installing a network of gas collection infrastructure to capture methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas naturally produced during the anaerobic decomposition of organic waste. The captured landfill gas is then routed to a combustion device, such as a generator, to produce renewable electricity, significantly reducing the site's greenhouse gas emissions while feeding power into the grid.

The Copping area in southeast Tasmania is a rural region characterized by mixed agricultural land uses, predominantly cattle grazing, sheep farming, and local forestry operations. The regional environment experiences a temperate climate with variable rainfall that fluctuates between periods of drought and high rainfall events. The soils in the immediate vicinity of the landfill contain bands of clays and gravels, which are actively extracted from on-site borrow pits to be utilized as capping and cover material for the waste.

This project has demonstrated long-term operational success and continues to undergo technological expansion by its proponent, LMS Energy Pty Ltd. To ensure ongoing compliance, the project has successfully transitioned through several methodology variations since its inception, moving from legacy waste capture rules to the 2021 electricity generation determination. In 2021, the local Joint Authority approved a lease extension for LMS Energy to accommodate a second power generation plant on the site. Furthermore, the project successfully fulfilled a major Commonwealth carbon abatement contract in October 2021, delivering its portion of a combined 385,393 tonnes of contracted abatement alongside several other LMS Energy facilities.