Landfill methane has to go somewhere, and Korean law requires that it be either destroyed or used. Whether using it pays is a separate question, answered by instruments outside the waste rules entirely — renewable certificates, a biogas production mandate, the domestic carbon market, and until recently the international offset system. Read together, they place landfill gas consistently below other waste-derived gas. This is what each channel pays, and why the gap looks like a policy position rather than an accident of classification.
The waste rules require a landfill generating gas from organic waste to collect it and either incinerate it or recover it for power or fuel. The two options discharge the same duty, so the decision to build generation rather than a flare is commercial, made against the channels below. Which sites face that decision at all is a separate question, since the gas is concentrated in municipal landfills, which in Korea are publicly operated (landfill gas market analysis).
Raw gas offtake is bilateral: gas piped to a neighbouring industrial user or district heating scheme, priced by contract, with no certificate or registry behind it. The value is what the counterparty agrees, for as long as the counterparty exists.
Wholesale power is the more common route. Gas fuels an engine or turbine and the output is sold at the system marginal price, with no premium attaching to its origin. This is commodity revenue, and the base on which the next channel is layered.
Under the renewable portfolio obligation, generators receive certificates calculated as megawatt-hours supplied multiplied by a weighting set for the energy source. The weighting is not a subsidy bolted on afterwards — it determines how many certificates a given output produces.
The current schedule places landfill gas at 0.5. In the same table at 1.0 sit tidal generation with a barrage and “other bioenergy,” a category expressly including bio-heavy oil and biogas; also at 1.0, mid-scale ground-mounted solar. Onshore wind is 1.2, fuel cells 1.9, offshore wind a base weighting of 2.5. Below landfill gas, at 0.25, sits waste energy other than that from non-renewable waste, with Bio-SRF and black liquor.
Landfill gas is therefore inside the renewable framework and near the bottom of it, grouped with wood pellets and wood chips. The comparison that matters is the adjacent one: gas from anaerobic digestion earns twice as many certificates per megawatt-hour as gas from a landfill. The molecule is similar; the treatment is not.
Korea enacted a statute to promote biogas produced from organic waste resources, with production targets phasing in for the public sector from 2025 and private obligated producers from 2026. Obligated producers must convert a rising share of their organic waste into biogas, which creates genuine obligated demand.
That demand does not reach landfill gas, because the statute defines it out. “Biogas” is defined as gas generated by converting organic matter — expressly excluding gas produced from organic waste at waste landfill sites. The exclusion sits inside the definition, in parentheses. The organic waste resources the statute does cover are sewage sludge, night soil, livestock manure, food waste, and animal and plant residues.
Two details make this hard to read as inadvertence. The same definitional provision separately defines emissions allowances as a term of the statute, so the drafting was alive to the carbon value of waste-derived gas. And the exclusion sits alongside a certificate schedule, in a different instrument, that discounts the same gas by half. Two instruments in two statutes drafted at different times place landfill gas below other waste-derived gas — a policy position, repeated, rather than an accident of classification. A judgment we label as such, but one the drafting supports on its face.
Korea's largest landfill gas project was registered under the Clean Development Mechanism, the international channel that closed at the end of 2023. Whatever it contributed to that project's economics is unavailable to a new one, and transition of legacy activity into the Paris Agreement's successor mechanism has been slow.
The domestic route remains: reductions achieved outside an emitter's own boundary can be certified as offset credits and converted for submission against emissions trading obligations. Three constraints apply. There is a cap on how much of an obligation may be met with offsets. Double counting is prohibited, so the same methane cannot be both a reduction inside an operator's own inventory and a credit it sells — worth checking wherever a landfill operator is itself a covered entity. And methodology approval and verification carry costs a small or declining gas stream may not support.
The price signal has meanwhile strengthened. Allowances closed above ₩30,000 per tonne in August 2026 against roughly ₩8,000 a year earlier, as the fourth planning period tightened allocation (Financial News, 25 August 2026). A stronger price is not the same as an accessible channel.
The US model for upgrading landfill gas to pipeline quality works because credits stack: a cellulosic RIN under the federal renewable fuel standard, a low-carbon fuel credit in California or an equivalent state programme, and a federal clean fuel production credit. Those instruments trade, which lets a project be financed against them rather than against a single offtake contract.
Korea has the legal foundation for injecting biomethane into the gas grid and raised the volume ceiling for direct supply substantially, but has no tradable instrument comparable to those credits. Pipeline injection is therefore a commercial arrangement between producer and buyer rather than a revenue stack. It is worth resisting the conclusion that the US route is simply better: changes to the US production credit taking effect in 2026 removed negative carbon-intensity treatment for the landfill gas pathway, weakening it relative to manure-based biogas. Both jurisdictions, for different reasons, now treat landfill gas as the least favoured of the waste gases.
For an operator weighing generation against flaring, the arithmetic is narrower than the renewable framing suggests: power revenue is commodity revenue, certificates arrive at half the rate other biogas receives, the mandate creates no obligated buyer, the carbon channel is capped and verification-heavy, and there is no upgrading route with a financeable credit behind it. Recovery can still make sense where the resource is large and stable, but on operating economics rather than policy support.
For an ESG or carbon function the caution differs. Methane destroyed at a flare and methane burned in an engine deliver the same climate outcome and the same statutory compliance, but only one is likely to be reported as an achievement — and where the operator is also a covered entity, the accounting must be consistent between inventory and any credit claim. The broader framework is in our carbon and energy due diligence guide, and the site-level questions in our piece on landfill gas in industrial landfill diligence.
This article is general information, not legal, investment or tax advice. Legal provisions and administrative rules are summarised as in force at publication; article, annex and notice numbers are deliberately not cited, amendments take effect on different dates, and Korean-language texts control. Certificate weightings are subject to periodic review and offset rules continue to develop across planning periods; the submission cap, conversion deadlines and methodology availability should be confirmed for the applicable period before being relied on. Allowance prices carry the dates shown and are attributed to the source cited. We state no figure for the size of the Korean landfill gas market, as no reliable public estimate was identified. Project-specific conclusions require an engagement, not an article.
Certificate eligibility, offset methodology, and double-counting exposure depend on the site, the operator's own regulatory status, and the applicable planning period. If you are assessing whether a Korean landfill gas project can be monetised, these should be confirmed against the site's own position.
Start a confidential discussionLast reviewed: 5 September 2026 · Dime Works