Ara Ake reflects on 2023 Renewable Gas Tour

GasNZ’s Matariki celebration in July provided the opportunity for Ara Ake’s chief executive Cristiano Marantes to share some of the highlights from the GasNZ renewable gas tour of Australia organised by GasNZ in April this year.

Speaking as part of a panel discussing the potential of renewable gas, Marantes said he was impressed with the scale of biogas production in Australia which has around 240 biogas plants, and that he also learned that the global scale of biogas is huge.

“Germany alone has almost 9,500 biogas plants and produces 20 times the amount of biogas than is currently produced in Australia.”

Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already reached 40 percent of their natural gas coming from biogas.

Tour highlights for Marantes included a landfill site in Adelaide where the harvested biogas was fed into generators to produce electricity. Most of which was exported to the grid, supplementing other more intermittent sources of renewable electricity such as solar and wind.

A food waste plant in Melbourne was diverting 140 tonnes of organic waste a day that would otherwise go to landfill.

Biogas was produced from an anaerobic digester and converted into electricity, 70 percent of which was fed into the grid, 20 percent used to power the associated wastewater treatment plant, with 10 percent powering the anaerobic digester itself.

In New South Wales, an abattoir was producing biogas by breaking down effluent and organic waste in an anaerobic digester. The resulting biogas was blended with natural gas (70 percent biogas and 30 percent natural gas) and used to produce renewable electricity to power the abattoir, reducing peak electricity consumption.

“The greenhouse gas reduction from using 70 percent biogas is significant,” Marantes said.

The international scale and success of biogas production from waste shows its potential uptake in New Zealand is not limited by technology, he said.

“I think it’s more around commercial aspects and having the role of biogas included in a national energy strategy.”

He said the tour helped him better appreciate the very real opportunities for New Zealand’s low-carbon energy future presented by the production of biogas and bio-methane.

Meanwhile, Ara Ake, New Zealand’s national future energy centre, had just received a $70 million, 10 year funding boost from the government.

GasNZ chief executive Janet Carson said that as a shareholder of Ara Ake, it was extremely pleasing that the government had given the centre long-term certainty of funding to allow it to progress its innovative work programme to support decarbonisation.

 GasNZ was keen to work with Ara Ake on opportunities to grow the renewable gas sector, she said.

 “Our industry ambition is that renewable gas is a material part of the energy mix over the next decade. This funding provides an excellent opportunity to see how working together we can make that happen.