Woy Woy Landfill Gas Upgrade Project

Woy Woy Landfill Gas Upgrade Project is an electricity generation from landfill gas project located at Woy Woy, approximately 80km north of Sydney and 8km south of Gosford on the Central Coast of New South Wales. It was registered in June 2022 and covers an unknown area size, as the spatial boundary is confined to the operational Woy Woy Waste Management Facility.

Electricity generation from landfill gas projects involve capturing methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, produced by the decomposition of organic legacy and non-legacy waste. The captured gas is routed to a combustion device to generate renewable electricity, which prevents the methane from freely venting into the atmosphere. Under this methodology, carbon abatement is calculated based on the energy content of the methane sent to the combustion system, rewarding facilities that upgrade or expand their existing gas collection infrastructure.

The Woy Woy region features coastal residential land, native bushland, and protected nature reserves like the nearby Brisbane Water National Park. The Central Coast environment is classified as a moderate to high coastal rainfall zone, with soils largely consisting of sandy loams and podzolic clays derived from Hawkesbury sandstone.

An interesting note about this project is that the proponent, LMS Energy, operates the facility in a long-standing partnership with the Central Coast Council. By implementing gas extraction networks across multiple local facilities, the Council has been able to generate thousands of megawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power thousands of local homes and prevent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from escaping into the atmosphere. Additionally, this specific project received a methodology variation in February 2024, successfully transitioning from the older 2015 Landfill Gas methodology to the updated 2021 Electricity Generation from Landfill Gas framework.