Lena Road Landfill Renewable Natural Gas Facility, Manatee County, Florida

Manatee County has been burning off a fuel source for years. The methane rising off the Lena Road Landfill gets flared, which is safe but produces nothing. That changes with a $50 million renewable natural gas plant that broke ground at the landfill on Oct. 9, 2026, the first landfill gas-to-RNG facility on Florida’s west coast.

Miami-based Nopetro Energy will own and operate the plant. Mead & Hunt is designing and building it, and Johnson Controls handled preliminary design and engineering. The county picked the Nopetro and Johnson Controls team in late 2025, and the commission approved the deal that December.

Project Scope

The plant captures landfill gas, the methane produced as buried waste breaks down, and runs it through a purification process that strips out the contaminants so it meets pipeline quality. The upgraded RNG then gets injected into existing natural gas pipelines and sold mostly as transportation fuel for buses and trucks.

Operations are expected to start in 2027. The project is supposed to support about 50 construction jobs and five permanent positions. Johnson Controls stays on after startup to run measurement and verification for the life of the project, which matters because RNG revenue depends on proving how much methane actually gets captured and sold.

The partners say the plant will produce enough energy to power more than 4,500 homes a year and cut emissions equal to 5.3 million gallons of gasoline annually. Those are the project team’s own projections and haven’t been independently verified, so treat them as targets.

Why It Matters

For the county, it’s a revenue play as much as an environmental one. Officials have pitched it as new income from gas that’s currently burned off, and Nopetro is putting up the $50 million, so the county doesn’t front the capital.

For Nopetro, it’s the second landfill plant in Florida after Vero Beach, and it feeds the company’s 15 RNG fueling stations around the state. Owning both the gas supply and the fueling network is the business model, and it gives Nopetro a captive buyer for what it produces.

Landfill gas projects are mostly pipe, compressors and treatment skids, not glamorous work. But if Lena Road runs the way the partners expect, it hands other Florida counties that still flare landfill gas a template they can copy.

Project Team & Details