NW Natural has sunk $20.8 million of ratepayer-backed capital into two anaerobic digestion projects at Tyson Foods beef packaging plants in Nebraska — one now slated for closure — while a third project at WM's Greater Wenatchee Regional Landfill in Washington is dead, according to a report published last week by the Sierra Club and Breach Collective.

The numbers behind the stalled portfolio are stark. NW Natural invested $8.3 million beginning in 2021 in a digester colocated with Tyson's beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, a facility once projected to deliver 190,000 mmBtus of renewable natural gas annually. Beef industry volatility has now doomed that plant. The utility has asked the Public Utility Commission of Oregon to let it charge ratepayers for the costs of the shuttered project.

The second Tyson project, a $12.5 million investment in Dakota City, Nebraska, was previously expected to produce 100,000 mmBtus of RNG per year. The utility has not publicly disclosed actual production volumes at the site in the last three reporting years.

Meanwhile, WM confirmed to Waste Dive that discussions with NW Natural over a landfill-gas-to-RNG project at the East Wenatchee site are not moving forward. The report noted the utility has quietly scrubbed references to the project from its website and recent filings. WM said it will continue to explore options for landfill gas projects at the site.

The Sierra Club and Breach Collective report — titled around what the groups call NW Natural's "biomethane boondoggle" — argues the utility's investments could cost ratepayers while failing to deliver climate benefits. Danny Noonan, climate, energy and labor strategist at Breach Collective and co-author of the report, was blunt in a statement.

"SB 98 was sold as a climate solution, but in practice it has become a subsidy for industrial animal agriculture and a lifeline for a gas utility trying to avoid real emissions reductions," Noonan said.

NW Natural pushed back hard. Stefanie Week, the utility's communications senior manager, dismissed the report as "a political pamphlet dressed up as research" and said it contains multiple inaccuracies.

"Several of the stated conclusions in the piece rely on mismatched carbon-accounting boundaries, and casual claims that cited data does not support. The report also reflects a glaring lack of transparent methodology, was not peer-reviewed, and includes multiple inaccuracies," Week wrote. She did not answer direct questions about where the utility's RNG credits were sourced or their range of carbon intensity scores.

Those scores matter. The report raised questions about the carbon intensity of credits NW Natural has acquired, noting that some disclosed intensity scores appear higher than the carbon intensity of fossil gas itself — which, if accurate, would undercut the program's core climate rationale.

The regulatory framework driving all of this is Oregon Senate Bill 98, enacted in 2019. The law allows gas utilities to invest ratepayer funds in RNG projects and sets escalating procurement targets: 15% RNG by 2030, 20% by 2035 and 30% by 2050. NW Natural supported the bill, as did an environmental coalition that included the Sierra Club — now one of its sharpest critics. The Oregon Refuse & Recycling Association also backed the measure, arguing it would help fund transmission infrastructure connecting landfill gas facilities to the grid.

NW Natural is nowhere near the first milestone. In an annual filing submitted to the Public Utility Commission of Oregon in June, the utility reported that RNG offset just 3.35% of its gas load in 2025 — less than a quarter of the way to the 2030 target.

The utility has changed strategy. In a December filing, NW Natural said it had shifted away from direct investment in RNG projects and now prioritizes offtake agreements with third parties, while still planning to acquire RNG equivalent to 4% of its total sold gas.

"This shift mitigates the risk of similar plant closures affecting the rest of NW Natural's RNG portfolio," the utility wrote.

The pattern extends beyond Oregon. Utilities in Canada and the European Union are pursuing similar RNG procurement mandates, and the waste sector has generally welcomed the arrangement as a revenue stream for landfill gas capture and organics digestion. The Oregon case study — with a closed digester, an undisclosed-production digester and a canceled landfill project — illustrates the execution risk.

What happens next turns on two pending decisions at the Public Utility Commission of Oregon: whether regulators will allow NW Natural to recover the costs of the closed Lexington digester from ratepayers, and how the commission will treat the utility's transition to third-party offtake agreements as it chases the 15% procurement deadline in 2030.