In 2008, a quiet industrial commissioning in the Surrey countryside marked a European first: waste company Sita and technology provider Gasrec were converting landfill gas at the Albury landfill site directly into liquid biomethane for use as a transport fuel. It was a pioneering moment. Nearly two decades later, that early experiment looks both prescient and, in some important respects, ahead of its time — the UK's landfill gas resource has contracted sharply, and the policy framework that might have turbocharged landfill biomethane never fully materialised. Yet the case for recovering value from the gas that still seeps from the nation's closed and active landfills has, if anything, grown stronger.
Key Takeaways
- The 2008 Sita/Gasrec project at Albury, Surrey was the first in Europe to convert landfill gas into liquid biomethane for transport, predating the UK's broader biomethane-to-grid sector by several years.
- Electricity from landfill gas was downgraded from 1 ROC/MWh to 0.25 ROC/MWh from April 2009 — exactly as the 2008 article anticipated — and further to 0.2 ROC/MWh by 2013, fundamentally weakening the economic case for new projects.
- The UK's biogas sector grew dramatically from 2010 onwards, driven by the Renewable Heat Incentive and to a very limited extent its successor the Green Gas Support Scheme — but policy support has focused almost entirely on anaerobic digestion, not landfill gas upgrading.
- Landfill gas power generation still accounts for around 3.2 TWh annually, but the resourcewill now be declining as waste diversion from landfill reduces the organic content of what is buried.
- The UK's 100 largest landfill sites could yield up to 5.5 TWh of additional biomethane if incentives were shifted from electricity generation to grid injection — a significant untapped opportunity.
- Scotland is moving towards banning biodegradable waste from landfill by the end 2026; England is targeting 2028. These measures will further reduce future landfill gas yields, making timely extraction and upgrading of existing gas all the more important.
A European First in Surrey
When the ENDS Report covered the Sita and Gasrec project in August 2008, it was a genuinely novel development. Landfill gas — the mixture of methane, carbon dioxide, and trace gases produced as buried organic waste decomposes in the absence of oxygen — had been used to generate electricity in the UK since 1985, and by the late 2000s was one of the country's most established renewable energy technologies. But converting it all the way to high-purity liquid biomethane, suitable for use as a transport fuel in heavy goods vehicles, was something nobody had done commercially in Europe before.
The Albury plant worked by dewatering the landfill gas, stripping out hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, and then liquefying the remaining methane to around 95% purity. The resulting liquid biomethane cut CO₂ emissions by 70% compared to diesel, reduced particulates by 90%, and cost approximately 30% less than the fossil alternative. Sita, haulage firm Hardstaff Group, Sainsbury's, and Veolia were among its first users.
"There are many ways of making electricity, many of which are better than waste."— Stuart Hayward-Higham, Sita's Head of Business Development, 2008
That remark by Sita's Stuart Hayward-Higham captures the strategic logic that drove the project: with landfill gas electricity's ROC support about to be slashed, converting the gas into a premium transport fuel offered both better economics and a significantly larger carbon benefit than simply burning it in a generator.
The ROC Cut: A Turning Point for Landfill Gas Electricity
The 2008 article was written with one eye on an imminent policy change. At the time, electricity generated from landfill gas attracted the same level of Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC) support as most other renewables — 1 ROC per MWh. From April 2009, as the article anticipated, that was cut to 0.25 ROC/MWh, reflecting government analysis that landfill gas electricity was already a mature, low-cost technology that did not need the same level of subsidy. By 2013, the rate was cut further to 0.2 ROC/MWh, compounding the effect on project economics at sites around the country.
ROCs were estimated to account for around 40–50% of total income for a typical landfill gas electricity site, so the successive reductions hit the sector hard. New projects became harder to finance. Existing ones saw their margins narrow. The long-term signal was unmistakable: landfill gas electricity was being wound down as a supported technology, and operators needed either to find new revenue streams — as Sita had tried to do at Albury — or plan for a future in which the subsidy would gradually disappear.
The Renewables Obligation itself was closed to new generators between 2015 and 2017, replaced by the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme. Sites already accredited continue to receive 20 years of ROC support, running through to March 2037, but CfDs are generally unsuited to landfill gas because of declining and unpredictable output volumes — landfill gas production at any given site falls by roughly 8% a year as the organic content of the buried waste is depleted.
The Rise of the Biomethane-to-Grid Sector (2010–2021)
While landfill gas electricity faced tightening support, a parallel and ultimately far larger story was unfolding in the broader biogas sector. The introduction of the Non-Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) in 2011 gave strong financial backing to a very different pathway: anaerobic digestion (AD) of food waste, sewage sludge, agricultural residues, and other organic materials, with the resulting biogas upgraded to biomethane and injected into the national gas grid.
CNG Services pioneered the first pilot biomethane-to-grid connection in Didcot in 2010, followed by the first commercial connection at Poundbury in 2012. The sector then grew rapidly: by 2015, the UK had made 50 biomethane-to-grid connections in total, making it, for the second year running, the fastest-growing biomethane market in the world. By 2018, 3.3 TWh of biomethane was being injected into the grid annually.
Crucially, this growth was built almost entirely on AD-based biomethane, not on landfill gas upgrading. The technical and regulatory pathways for injecting AD-derived biomethane into the grid were well-developed; the equivalent infrastructure for landfill gas lagged behind. When the Environment Agency published its quality protocol for biomethane from waste in 2014, setting out end-of-waste criteria for grid injection, it covered both landfill gas and AD — but in practice, only a very small amount of landfill-derived biomethane (0.1 PJ, at a single site) was being produced for the transport sector as of 2014, still essentially the Albury project or its successor.
Landfill Gas & Biomethane: Key Milestones Since 2008
Landfill Gas in 2026: A Declining but Significant Resource
The scale of the UK's broader biogas achievement by the mid-2020s is remarkable. The sector now processes around 36 million tonnes of organic waste annually, generating 21 TWh of biogas — enough to contribute meaningfully to the country's renewable energy mix and support around 4,800 jobs. There are now over 700 biomethane plants in Britain, a figure that has doubled over the last decade.
Landfill gas, however, occupies an increasingly awkward position within this picture. As of the end of 2023, landfill gas power generation accounted for approximately 3.2 TWh per year, with an installed capacity of 400 MW under the Renewables Obligation scheme — still a substantial contribution, but one with a ceiling that is falling rather than rising.
The fundamental reason is straightforward: less waste is going to landfill. The combination of the Landfill Tax (introduced in 1996 and rising steadily), the EU Landfill Directive's requirements to divert biodegradable waste, and ambitious recycling targets has fundamentally changed what enters the ground. Landfill gas capture rates peaked at 74% in 2016 and have since declined to around 70% as biogas incentives have waned and the organic richness of newly buried waste has diminished. The Climate Change Committee has noted that progress on reducing landfill methane has stalled since the mid-2010s.
With Scotland implementing a ban on biodegradable municipal waste going to landfill by 2026, and England consulting on a similar measure targeting 2028, the trajectory is clear: future landfill gas yields will continue to fall. The existing stock of buried waste, however — accumulated over decades — will continue generating gas for many years to come.
The Policy Gap: Why Landfill Biomethane Has Been Left Behind
The most striking aspect of landfill gas policy since 2008 is not the ROC reduction — that was a logical response to a mature technology — but rather the failure to create a successor incentive for upgrading landfill gas to grid-quality biomethane. When the Green Gas Support Scheme (GGSS) launched in November 2021 as a replacement for the RHI, it was explicitly limited to biomethane produced via anaerobic digestion. Landfill gas was excluded from the scheme entirely.
This creates a structural problem. Landfill gas power generation continues under the ROC scheme until existing accreditations expire, but with diminishing returns and no route to upgrading into the higher-value biomethane market. Meanwhile, by shifting incentives towards biomethane injection, the UK could unlock up to 5.5 TWh of additional biomethane from its 100 largest landfill sites in the short term — a significant contribution to the government's net zero ambitions.
The government's February 2024 call for evidence on a future biomethane production framework did acknowledge landfill gas upgrading as a potential contributor. The Biomass Strategy envisaged that upgrading landfill gas to biomethane could be an important contributor to the 30–40 TWh of biomethane production targeted by 2050, though it noted that technological development and cost-effectiveness considerations remain. A future policy framework for biomethane, planned to follow the GGSS, could potentially address this gap — but detailed proposals had not yet been finalised as of early 2026.
The Technology: From Liquefaction to Grid Injection
One important evolution since 2008 is in the technologies available for landfill biomethane. The Albury project liquefied its biomethane for transport use — a complex process well-suited to fuelling vehicle fleets at depots, but less flexible than grid injection. Today, companies such as French firm Waga Energy have developed proprietary cryogenic distillation processes — their WAGABOX® technology — that can separate methane from the air, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and other contaminants found in landfill gas, producing grid-quality biomethane regardless of the variable composition typical of landfill sites. Converting landfill gas to biomethane via this route offers an energy yield two to three times greater than electricity generation from the same gas stream, dramatically improving the economics of recovery.
Waga Energy operates projects across France, Spain, Canada, and the United States. As of early 2026, it was developing its presence in the UK and Italian markets, with its first Italian WAGABOX® unit due to commission in 2026 at a Tuscan landfill site. The technology represents the kind of step-change in landfill biomethane that could unlock the UK's remaining resource — but it requires the policy framework to make the economics work.
Biomethane as Transport Fuel: From Albury to a Growing Fleet
The transport biomethane story that began at Albury in 2008 did not stop there, even if landfill-derived fuel remained a small part of it. The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) has been an important mechanism, providing Renewable Transport Fuel Certificates (RTFCs) for biomethane used as vehicle fuel — with waste-derived biomethane qualifying for double certificates, reflecting its additional waste-management benefits. Supermarket distribution fleets, refuse collection vehicles, and bus operators have increasingly adopted bio-CNG (compressed natural gas derived from biomethane) as a lower-carbon alternative to diesel.
On a full lifecycle basis, bio-CNG provides around a 72% reduction in CO₂ emissions compared to diesel, consistent with the figures cited for the Albury liquid biomethane in 2008. The environmental case remains compelling. What has shifted is the source of the biomethane: the vast majority now comes from AD plants rather than landfill, reflecting both the policy incentives and the broader decline in landfill gas volumes.
Conclusion
The Sita and Gasrec project at Albury in 2008 was a genuine innovation — a demonstration that landfill gas could be worth far more than the electricity it had traditionally been used to generate, and that the transport sector offered a high-value, low-carbon outlet for it. The article's prediction that electricity from landfill gas would face an uncertain economic future proved correct: the ROC cuts came as anticipated, and the broader policy environment has since shifted decisively towards AD-based biomethane and away from landfill gas upgrading.
Yet the case for landfill biomethane did not disappear with the policy support. The UK still has hundreds of active and closed landfill sites generating gas from decades of buried organic waste. The potential to unlock up to 5.5 TWh of additional biomethane from the country's largest sites remains unrealised, held back chiefly by the absence of a dedicated policy mechanism. As England and Scotland move towards banning biodegradable waste from landfill, and as the focus of the energy transition sharpens on every available low-carbon gas source, landfill biomethane deserves a more prominent place in the policy conversation. The technology exists. The gas is there. The question is whether the framework will follow.
Frequently Asked Questions
Landfill Gas is Used to Make Biomethane Vehicle Fuel
In a first for Europe, waste company Sita is using landfill gas at one of its sites in Surrey to make a transport fuel — liquid biomethane.
Landfill gas is being used to make liquid biomethane for use as a vehicle fuel — the first time it has been used like this in Europe. Waste firm Sita and technology provider Gasrec are in the final stages of commissioning plant at Sita's Albury landfill site in Surrey. The landfill produces some 2,500 m³ of landfill gas per hour, and this will be used to make 5,000 tonnes of biomethane — enough to power 150 heavy goods vehicles.
The plant works by dewatering the landfill gas, then removing hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The remaining methane, about 95% pure, is liquefied. According to Richard Lilleystone, Gasrec's chief executive, the resulting liquid biomethane cuts CO₂ emissions by 70% compared to diesel, particulates by 90% and SO₂ by 50%. The fuel is also around 30% cheaper.
The fuel is being used by Sita, haulage firm Hardstaff Group, as well as Sainsbury's in one of its delivery trucks. It is also being trialled by waste company Veolia in a street cleaning vehicle in Camden, north London, to assess its performance in urban areas. All users have their own refuelling infrastructure at depots.
According to Stuart Hayward-Higham, Sita's head of business development, the firm decided to develop the plant as the economic future for electricity from landfill gas is uncertain. "There are many ways of making electricity, many of which are better than waste," he said. From next April, electricity from landfill gas will only receive 0.25 renewable obligation certificates (ROCs) per megawatt hour of electricity generated. This compares to the current 1 ROC.
Using landfill gas to make transport fuel rather than electricity also offers a significantly larger reduction in CO₂ emissions, says the Renewable Energy Association.
1 Comments
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