Biogas on the Rise: The ABC’s Push for Industry Growth

By The American Biogas Council

For the last 5 years, the American Biogas Council (ABC) has reported 75 to over one hundred new projects coming online each year, both for renewable natural gas (RNG) and electricity generation projects.

This growth is two to four times the annual growth of the five years before then. Specifically, in 2024—a record-breaking year—125 new projects came online, bringing the total number of operating U.S. facilities to nearly 2,500.

But continued industry growth isn’t guaranteed. Making sure helpful policies get developed and disruptive policies are defeated, as well as continued education on the subject and training are required to keep the momentum going and maximize the amount of organic waste recycled in the U.S. Here are a few highlights of what’s happening to get us there.

This year has brought both opportunities and challenges as the administration of President Trump seeks to change American energy policy. Recognizing that new political staff may not fully appreciate biogas, we launched an advertising campaign in April. Our first targets: administration officials and agency staff, followed by members of Congress and their teams.

Our message was simple and factual: Biogas recycles waste into energy and can boost American energy dominance.

At the same time, we conducted a national poll of American voters to gauge public awareness and support for biogas. Initially, the majority of respondents didn’t support biogas—mainly because they didn’t know what it was.

Support for biogas is 37% for those who don’t know what it is. But after hearing a short, four-sentence unbiased explanation for what biogas systems do, support for biogas jumps dramatically to 86%! And these voters not only support biogas, they also support federal spending to increase biogas production. If anything underscores our collective need to educate audiences, this does—a nearly 300% return on investment.

We immediately reported these findings to Congress, demonstrating that three out of four voters want their representatives to support biogas through energy tax credits and Farm Bill funding, and some of that work bore fruit with the One Big Beautiful Bill.

And while we’ve been rallying support in Washington, we’ve also been working with investors to see the full value of biogas project development. One key to this is attaining recognition of the full carbon reductions biogas systems provide.

To recognize the full value of carbon reductions from biogas, the ABC recently launched the Biogas Carbon Accounting Tool (CAT), a tool for developers and buyers of biogas or RNG alike. The Biogas CAT calculates carbon reduction at the facility level, factoring in all key variables in a way no other methodology does globally.

The science is based on Argonne’s GREET and extended to overlooked parts and types of projects. Now it’s time we advocate for groups and companies to adopt and use the Biogas CAT as the standard method to calculate the lifecycle emissions of biogas projects.

Our team at the ABC is grateful to more than 6,000 professionals at more than 400 companies that make up our membership for all of their work on behalf of the industry. If you’re not one of those companies or want to check, please visit us at americanbiogascouncil.org. We can do more together.

For more information, read our USA Biogas Magazine.