West Belconnen Landfill Gas Upgrade Project

West Belconnen Landfill Gas Upgrade Project is a landfill gas upgrade project located at the closed West Belconnen Resource Management Centre in Parkwood, situated on the northwestern edge of the Belconnen district in the Australian Capital Territory. It was registered in June 2020. While the exact project area is officially unknown, it operates directly on the historical landfill footprint, which sits adjacent to the broader 1,623ha West Belconnen development site.

Landfill gas projects involve managing methane generated from the breakdown of legacy and non-legacy organic waste in a landfill. Under an upgrade project, an existing landfill gas collection system is improved to capture additional methane beyond its historical baseline. The captured gas is then combusted, which prevents the potent methane from freely venting into the atmosphere by converting it into carbon dioxide and water.

The surrounding Belconnen area is historically characterized by peri-urban grazing lands, conservation corridors along the nearby riverways, and expanding residential and open-space developments like the new Ginninderry sustainable community. The ACT region experiences a temperate climate with moderate, semi-arid-leaning rainfall (typically around 600-650mm annually), and the local soils are generally shallow, stony, and clay loams.

An interesting note about this project is that it is part of a 15-year contract awarded to LGI Limited by the ACT Government in 2019 to handle landfill emissions across the territory. While LGI's counterpart project at the Mugga Lane landfill captures enough gas to generate commercial renewable electricity for thousands of homes, gas volumes at the older, closed West Belconnen landfill are not sufficient for power generation. Instead, LGI installed a bespoke, ERF-compliant enclosed flare to safely destroy the methane onsite. Even though there is no regulatory requirement to capture the biogas at this location, the project earns Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) for achieving abatement above its 36% baseline, making the flaring operation commercially viable. The project has also undergone multiple method variations to transition to the 2021 legislative updates.