Life beyond lutefisk, how Norway is quietly changing the world of biogas

The Basics: Land of Fjords, Fish… and Fermentation?

Norway isn’t the first country that comes to mind when you think about biogas. With more hydropower than it knows what to do with, and the largest sovereign wealth fund ever accumulated in human history, it doesn’t need biogas to solve an energy crisis.

But Norway does have an agricultural sector. It has waste. It has public transport. And increasingly, it has climate targets with real teeth. Enter biogas: not as a hero, but as a workhorse.

Norway currently produces around 0.7 TWh of biogas annually—about 70 million cubic metres. Tiny, by global standards. But that number masks something important: nearly 90% of it is upgraded to biomethane and used in transport, primarily public buses and waste trucks.

In other words, Norway isn’t just producing biogas. It’s using it intelligently.

Waste Not, Want Not

Norwegian biogas is almost entirely waste-based. Food waste, manure, fish processing residues (the latter is a polite euphemism for something really much nastier) – you name it, if it’s a long-chain hydrocarbon, the plucky Norwegians will try to turn it into gas. The country banned biodegradable waste from landfills in 2009, which means anything organic has to go somewhere else. Anaerobic digestion (AD) became the logical home.

This is a critical distinction. Much of continental Europe still relies on food crops to feed digesters, which is a bit like growing maize to heat your pizza oven. Norway, by contrast, builds its biogas sector on the back of real circular economy principles. It’s the difference between climate accounting and climate action.

And the feedstocks are geographically appropriate. Norway’s west coast is a hub for aquaculture, meaning lots of that nasty “fish residue” stuff. Inland regions like Trøndelag supply dairy waste. Oslo, the bit where most Norwegians live, provides urban food waste and the other ‘stuff’ that Oslo people produce a day or so after eating. 

It’s a jigsaw puzzle—messy, decentralised, and hard to scale. But it’s also resilient.

Public Money, Public Purpose

Let’s not pretend this is all the result of free markets and Viking pluck. Norwegian biogas has been heavily supported by the state, through Enova (the state climate investment fund), Innovasjon Norge, and generous feed-in support for biomethane in transport.

But here’s the difference: the support isn’t trying to create an abstract green megatrend. It’s solving real, local problems.

Want to decarbonise Oslo’s public transport? Use local food waste to fuel Ruter buses. Need to manage manure in central Norway? Build a co-digestion plant and feed the resulting gas into a small local grid or, better yet, a dairy truck fleet. It’s targeted, fit-for-purpose, and grounded in the kind of logic that rarely makes it past the strategy slide in a multinational boardroom.

And it works. Norway now has over 700 biomethane-powered buses, with more on the way. The city of Trondheim now runs some of its waste collection fleet on locally sourced biogas and is phasing out diesel trucks.

This isn’t greenwashing. These aren’t unicorn valuations. Just a boring sector doing a boring job every day, but it’s sustainable and it actually happens.

The banks are quietly starting to take notice, and we are super pleased to have just closed, the signing of a financing agreement for the construction of the Hardanger Biogas plant. This is greenfield bio-LNG facility located in Husnes Industriområde on the Norwegian west coast. This plant will process approximately 120,000 tons of feedstock annually, consisting of manure, that fish residue stuff and food waste, and aims to produce around 90 GWh of liquefied biomethane each year. We are tearfully proud to be associated with it.

The Hard Stuff: Digestate, Permitting, and the Scaling Ceiling

Of course, it’s not all fjord-side serenity. Norwegian biogas faces the same challenges as everywhere else.

Digestate the semi-liquid byproduct of AD is an ongoing headache. Spreading it as fertiliser is fine in theory, but is subject to strict rules as its full of nitrogen, so had to be applied carefully. Transporting it across long distances is expensive and ruinous for carbon intensity scores.

Permitting is another bottleneck. Norway’s famously rigorous environmental review processes mean that projects can get stuck in the system for years. The flip side is that once they’re built, the plants tend to be well-integrated, with high public trust. (Compare that to the Netherlands, where opposing planning for pretty much anything has become a national pastime.)

And then there’s scale. Norway simply doesn’t have the volumes of waste to fuel a biogas sector of German proportions. At most, the country could double or triple its current output. That’s respectable but it won’t move the dial much on global carbon emissions.

There’s a phrase we like in renewable finance: “Scalable solutions.” It’s the codeword for project that get attention, capital, and hopefully eventually a government minister cutting a ribbon to open your new project. That’s why pictures of offshore wind get put on the front of infrastructure fund’s glossy brochures and biogas gets relegated to the section at the back called “other technologies”. Biogas is much harder to scale which leads us to the real question: What’s the point?

Biogas as a Strategic Asset

Here’s the thing. If you judge biogas purely by volume, you’ll miss the value. Norway isn’t building a biogas sector to compete with LNG. It’s building it to:

• Decarbonise heavy and municipal transport
• Manage biological waste sustainably
• Support rural circular economies
• Enhance energy resilience in off-grid areas

It’s not a headline strategy. It’s a support beam in a wider play about making an already nice and green country just a little bit nicer and greener.

And in a world increasingly obsessed with scale and disruption, that kind of quiet utility matters. Because the energy transition isn’t just about building big things, it’s about making everything work better. Biogas is the lubricant in that machine.

Lessons for Investors and Policymakers

If you’re a trophy-hunting infra investor, Norwegian biogas probably won’t dazzle you. Projects are small. Timelines are long. The Hardanger project took a year from soup to nuts—and by soup, we obviously mean liquefied cow manure and cod intestines.

But if you care about portfolio resilience, localised decarbonisation, and circularity that actually happens outside of PowerPoint decks—this sector is worth watching.

For policymakers:

• Don’t force biogas to act like wind or solar
• Don’t chase gigawatt headlines
• Focus on what it actually does best: local waste, local fuel, local heat

And please, standardise digestate rules. Because nobody should need a PhD in nitrogen management just to fertilise a turnip.

For investors:

• Think platforms, not one-offs
• Aggregate small projects across the Nordics
• Back experienced operators

Conclusion: Modest, Mature, and (Almost) Invisible

Norwegian biogas won’t save the world. But it’s not trying to.

It’s a sector that understands its purpose, plays to its strengths, and avoids the hype. It’s locally rooted, circular by nature, and remarkably efficient. In other words, it’s everything a serious energy transition needs but rarely gets.

So no, you won’t see Norwegian biogas at the top of your next infra fund press release newsletter. And you probably won’t be making lutefisk for Christmas any time soon (please don’t).  But if you see a bus in Bergen running on biomethane made from old cod heads and cow manure, give it a respectful nod. It’s doing more for climate action than a dozen policy conferences in far-off places.