Scholarship recipient backs biomethane

Tim Lepper (far left) on renewable gas tour, Australia

Tim Lepper is a Taranaki local through and through. He grew up in New Plymouth around the oil and gas industry. Today Tim is working back in New Plymouth with a focus on renewable gas. As a senior project manager for Firstgas, Tim is leading the development of the company’s biomethane process at the Ecogas biogas facility in Reporoa. In a separate endeavour, Tim’s parents have a pig farm in the region and are making biogas in a project with Ara Ake. Gas is changing!

By Tim Lepper

I was fortunate enough to be selected by the Kennedy Education Scholarship Trust to attend the GasNZ hosted Australian Renewable Gas Tour. It was a great opportunity to experience several existing biogas projects with varying feed stocks and varying commercial models.

We observed biogas projects at landfills, wastewater treatment plants, anaerobic digestion facilities and animal processing facilities which were all providing either behind the meter electricity to reduce operating costs, or for electricity export to the local grid.

Australia, although our close neighbours, have a vastly different energy landscape to New Zealand. With a majority of Australia’s electricity generation coming from fossil production, it makes sense to incentivise and encourage renewable electricity production. Certification of the renewable energy and incentives from central and local government have been the carrot a number of these biogas projects needed to get off the ground, but the overwhelming response from the operators to my question: “Would you do a biogas project again?’ was “Absolutely!”

New Zealand’s energy landscape is significantly different, with greater than 85% of our electricity already coming from renewable sources due to our rich resource of hydro, geothermal and wind, the driver for further renewable electricity projects is not as critical. But with our abundant agricultural industry there is countless opportunity to turn waste streams that would otherwise end up in landfill into biogas. Rather than burning this biogas for electrical production, where scale is achievable, we need to be considering upgrading this biogas into biomethane utilising globally mature technology. This biomethane is a drop-in substitute to the national gas grid, displacing natural gas and gives existing and future customers ability to decarbonise their process without costly infrastructure changes.

We have the opportunity in New Zealand to have a predominantly renewable electricity grid, and to also to decarbonise our gas infrastructure, by utilising existing food, commercial and agricultural waste streams and start injecting upgraded bio-methane into the existing gas grid.

Firstgas is currently working with Ecogas to upgrade their biogas to achieve just that, and biomethane is expected to be injected in Q2 2024.

As one of the members on the gas tour said at the conclusion of our trip “Biogas – what’s not to like!”