IN Brief:
- The Nurmo facility has approximately 100GWh of annual liquefied-biogas capacity, equivalent to around 10 million litres of diesel.
- Manure, agricultural residues, and food-industry by-products are being converted into renewable fuel and recycled biofertilisers.
- Raw biogas production is under way, with liquefaction scheduled for autumn as Suomen Lantakaasu pursues a larger Finnish biogas network.
Suomen Lantakaasu has inaugurated Finland’s first industrial-scale production facility for liquefied biogas at Nurmo, establishing a new processing link between farms, food-industry by-products, renewable transport fuel, and recycled nutrients.
The plant has annual production capacity of approximately 100GWh of liquefied biogas, which its developers equate to around 10 million litres of diesel. It has been developed by Nurmon Bioenergia Oy, majority-owned by Suomen Lantakaasu, with Atria Finland as a minority shareholder.
Feedstock is supplied from manure generated by local farms together with agricultural residues and food-industry by-products. The material is processed into biogas, while nutrients recovered from the process are returned in the form of biofertilisers.
More than 30,000 tonnes of manure had already been received by the time of the inauguration. The plant is producing raw biogas, with liquefaction scheduled to begin during autumn 2026, meaning the facility is entering operation in stages rather than beginning immediately at full liquefied-gas output.
The plant sits in South Ostrobothnia, one of Finland’s important food-producing regions, and its ownership connects several parts of that production base. Suomen Lantakaasu is a joint venture between St1 Biokraft and dairy group Valio, while Atria’s participation links the project directly to a major meat and food-processing business operating in Nurmo.
The resulting system gives agricultural and food-manufacturing residues a production use beyond conventional waste handling. Manure and suitable by-products become feedstock for fuel production, while nutrients are retained for agricultural use rather than being removed permanently from the regional production cycle.
Atria has identified efficient use of food-industry by-products and improved nutrient recycling among the benefits of the project. Valio has similarly focused on the potential to turn manure from dairy farms into an energy feedstock while returning recycled fertilisers that crops can use.
The fuel output is aimed particularly at applications where high energy density remains important. Liquefied biogas can be used in heavy-duty road transport and other sectors in which replacing diesel with battery-electric systems can be more difficult because of range, payload, charging, or operating patterns.
For food manufacturers, that creates a potential connection between production residues and the transport operations serving plants. Large processors generate regular inbound and outbound freight movements, while their surrounding agricultural supply bases can also produce substantial quantities of manure and organic residues.
Nurmo concentrates those elements within one regional system. The economics of such projects depend heavily on feedstock availability, collection distances, processing reliability, and demand for the finished gas, so locating production close to a dense agricultural and food-manufacturing cluster reduces some of the logistical problem.
The biofertiliser output is a second part of the model. Anaerobic digestion changes the form of the organic material without eliminating its nutrient value, allowing treated fractions to be returned to farms and reducing the extent to which the system becomes a one-way flow from agriculture into energy production.
The project has also received public support. Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment granted €9.4 million in energy investment aid, while the Ministry of the Environment provided €101,800 towards the plant’s biofertiliser loading-tank investment.
Those contributions reflect the number of policy objectives carried by the project. It touches renewable energy, agricultural productivity, nutrient management, transport decarbonisation, domestic energy supply, and food-industry resource efficiency rather than fitting comfortably into a single sector.
Suomen Lantakaasu intends Nurmo to form part of a much larger production network. Its longer-term objective is to establish a nationwide biogas ecosystem producing a total of one terawatt-hour of domestic renewable energy annually.
Reaching that scale will require more than replicating the digestion technology. Each location needs reliable feedstock volumes, suitable transport distances, farmers willing to participate, markets for the gas and fertiliser outputs, and infrastructure capable of handling upgrading and liquefaction.
Nurmo provides an unusually concentrated starting point because agriculture, food processing, and fuel demand already operate at significant scale in the surrounding region. The plant’s 100GWh design capacity is substantial enough to test whether those relationships work as an integrated industrial system rather than as a small demonstration project.
The immediate engineering milestone is now the start of liquefaction later this autumn. Raw biogas production is already under way, but sustained liquefied-biogas output will show whether the feedstock, processing, upgrading, and distribution chain can operate together at the scale planned.