Methane Recovery Project Houbensteyn Ysselsteyn, Limburg, The Netherlands

Audit Analysis

A long-running Dutch methane recovery project with VVB-confirmed additionality and a 0.5 conservativity factor, but undermined by five material findings that rely on estimation rather than direct measurement, a 0% leakage deduction that is difficult to justify for a biogas project, and eleven contradictions across its document set. The project delivered essentially 100% of its claimed reductions for the 2022 monitoring period, but the sharp drop from 58,034 tCO₂e in the prior period to 15,201 tCO₂e raises questions about the stability and reliability of the underlying data.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Five material findings in the 2025 verification report indicate that biogas flow, methane content, manure quantities, and fossil-fuel replacement are all estimated or calculated indirectly rather than measured directly, with a flow-meter issue explicitly cited.
• ⚠Leakage deduction is 0% with a 'quantified' justification, yet no quantified leakage figure is provided in the extracted record; a 0.1% figure appears in the contemporaneous monitoring report, creating an inconsistency.
• ⚠The verified ERR dropped from 58,034 tCO₂e (2023 verification report) to 15,201 tCO₂e (2024 verification report), a 74% decline between consecutive periods, without a clear explanation in the extracted data.
• ⚠The additionality test type is recorded as 'barrier' in the 2007 validation report but 'regulatory' in the 2022 PDD, a fundamental discrepancy that is not reconciled in the available documents.

Credit Vintages