Harvey Beef Covered Anaerobic Lagoon Project

Harvey Beef Covered Anaerobic Lagoon Project is an industrial wastewater project located in Harvey, approximately 140km south of Perth in Western Australia. It was registered in October 2019 by Harvey Industries Group Pty Ltd. While the specific spatial area is not defined in hectares, the project is situated at the Harvey Processing Facility, which spans a 190-hectare site. The surrounding Shire of Harvey is a premier agricultural region heavily utilized for dairy farming, beef cattle grazing, and citrus orcharding.

Domestic, commercial and industrial wastewater projects reduce greenhouse gas emissions by capturing and combusting methane generated during the treatment of organic wastewater. Standard requirements involve calculating the emissions avoided by replacing open lagoons with closed systems, continuously monitoring the volume of biogas captured, and ensuring the metered combustion of that gas. In this project, deep open anaerobic lagoons that were historically treating industrial wastewater were replaced with a Covered Anaerobic Lagoon (CAL). The captured biogas is then continuously combusted using an on-site boiler.

The Harvey region experiences a Mediterranean climate generally classified as high rainfall, receiving between 750mm and 1050mm annually, largely concentrated in the cooler winter months. The local landscape sits on the Swan Coastal Plain, which is characterized by diverse soil types. These predominantly feature coastal sandy Aeolian dunal soils alongside fluvial clay soils, such as the medium to heavy loamy clays found on the Pinjarra plain.

This project serves as Harvest Road Group's (the parent company of Harvey Beef) first major emissions reduction initiative. By utilizing the captured biogas to fuel their on-site boiler, the facility has successfully reduced its reliance on natural gas by approximately one-third. The initiative has the potential to generate up to 14,000 Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) over a 7-year crediting period. Additionally, the project underwent a methodology variation in March 2025 to transition to Compilation No. 3 of the 2015 wastewater determination.