Latvia's Biomethane Outlook: Why the Real Story Is the CO2 We're Throwing Away
A recent Dienas Bizness analysis maps where Latvia stands on biogas and biomethane — and the picture is part catch-up, part opportunity. We're relaying it here because tucked inside the biomethane transition is a feedstock the Latvian e-fuels scene can't afford to keep venting: biogenic CO2.
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HydrogenLatvia
6/17/20266 min read
There's a piece in Dienas Bizness that's worth your time if you follow Latvia's energy transition at all. Juris Paiders walks through where the country actually stands on biogas and biomethane — the production numbers, the EU comparisons, the policy missteps and corrections. It's a clear-eyed read, and we'd point Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders to it without hesitation.
But we're relaying it for a specific reason. Because the article does an excellent job on the biomethane transition itself — and in doing so, it walks right up to a second story that the e-fuels scene has every reason to care about. One that's hiding in the upgrading step. So let's start with the outlook the piece lays out, and then add the layer we think matters most for where the Baltic alternative-fuels conversation is heading.
Where Latvia stands on biomethane
Start with the facts the article puts on the table. According to Latvia's Central Statistical Bureau (CSP) data cited in the piece, Latvia produced 7 million cubic metres of biomethane and 86 million cubic metres of biogas in 2024, against total natural gas consumption of 849 million cubic metres. That puts biomethane at roughly 0.8% of national gas demand — small, but worth noting it didn't even appear in official statistics before 2024.
The momentum is genuine. The Bovo Gas plant, a subsidiary of AS Balticovo, opened in July 2024 with a capacity that could exceed 10 million cubic metres of biomethane per year. In September 2025, AS Agrofirma Tērvete launched a liquefied biomethane facility. The article notes that together, just these two plants could in theory cover around 1.4% of Latvia's annual gas demand. Producers like Latvijas Zaļā degviela are part of the same wave.
The honest part — and the article doesn't soften it — is that Latvia is falling behind. Sustainable biogas consumption dropped roughly 50% between 2021 and 2024, one of the steepest declines in the EU, as the country walked away from environmentally damaging practices like growing maize biomass on prime farmland purely to feed digesters. Per capita, Latvia slipped from above the EU average in 2021 to well below it by 2024. That's the gap we're operating against, and the article frames biomethane as one of the clearer ways to diversify Latvia's energy-supply risk during global energy shocks.
So far, so good — and we'd stop there if the story ended at the gas grid. It doesn't.
The upgrading step is where the second story begins
Here's the technical pivot the article sets up beautifully. Raw biogas can't go into the gas grid — it doesn't meet the chemical standard. To become biomethane, it has to be upgraded: stripped of its 30-50% carbon dioxide content until methane reaches 95-99%. The article correctly identifies water scrubbing as the most common, relatively cheap method, where CO2 dissolves into water while methane doesn't.
And that's the moment worth dwelling on. When you separate the CO2 to make clean biomethane, you're left with a concentrated, near-pure stream of carbon dioxide. In most plants today, it simply gets vented to the atmosphere. According to research published in Reviews in Environmental Science and Bio/Technology (2025), producing one tonne of biomethane generates roughly two tonnes of biogenic CO2. We'd flag that as an approximate figure worth verifying against a specific plant configuration, but the order of magnitude is well established.
Around two tonnes of clean, biogenic carbon for every tonne of fuel. Released for free, into the sky. That's the part we want to relay forward.
Why biogenic carbon is different from fossil carbon
This is where a byproduct turns into a strategy. Not all CO2 is equal — not in climate accounting, and not in EU regulation.
Fossil CO2, released from burning oil or gas pulled out of the ground, adds carbon to the atmosphere that wasn't there before. Biogenic CO2 is part of the short carbon cycle: plants absorb CO2 through photosynthesis, that biomass becomes feedstock, the digester releases the carbon, and new plants absorb it again. Nothing net-new accumulates. Capture and reuse that biogenic carbon instead of venting it, and you've closed a loop rather than opened one.
That distinction is now written into law. Under the EU's Renewable Energy Directive (RED III), carbon-based e-fuels — e-methanol, e-kerosene, e-methane — only count as renewable fuels of non-biological origin (RFNBO) if their carbon comes from permitted sources: direct air capture, biogenic CO2, or industrial point sources. And the fossil industrial route is being phased out. From 2041, fossil CO2 from industry no longer qualifies; only carbon captured from the air or from sustainable biomass will count. We'd recommend verifying the exact deadline and transitional provisions against the current consolidated RED III text, as implementing details continue to evolve.
That reframes the whole thing. After 2041, biogenic CO2 isn't a nice-to-have — it becomes one of only two compliant carbon sources for e-fuels at scale. Direct air capture stays expensive. Biomethane upgrading, by contrast, hands you a concentrated biogenic CO2 stream as a near-free byproduct of a process you were already running.
The e-fuel opportunity the biomethane build-out creates
Now connect the dots the two stories share. Latvia is building biomethane capacity. Every one of those plants generates a biogenic CO2 stream. And the Latvian hydrogen ecosystem is, in parallel, working to stand up green hydrogen from renewable electricity.
Put green hydrogen and biogenic CO2 together and you have the exact recipe for e-fuels. Hydrogen and captured CO2 combine through methanation or synthesis routes — Fischer-Tropsch, methanol synthesis — to produce e-methane, e-methanol and synthetic liquid fuels that drop into existing infrastructure, ships and aircraft.
This isn't theoretical. In Spain, AGR Biogás recently agreed to supply biogenic CO2 from its biomethane plants to TURN2X, which combines it with green hydrogen to make e-methane — building the synthesis units directly beside the biogas plants so the carbon barely has to travel. At KIT in Germany, the ICODOS process upgrades biogas to biomethane and produces green e-methanol from the separated CO2 in a single integrated step. The circular model is already running commercially elsewhere in Europe.
The scale of the prize is real. The European Biogas Association estimates EU biomethane plants could capture up to 89 million tonnes of biogenic CO2 annually by 2040 — more than a quarter of the carbon capture the EU Climate Law will require. Today, 125 plants across Europe already capture 1.17 million tonnes a year. For Latvia, producing e-fuels from indigenous hydrogen and indigenous biogenic carbon means alternative fuels made at home, not imported.
What this means for export potential and energy independence
Here's the bigger picture, and the one Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders should hold onto. Every litre of e-fuel produced domestically from Latvian renewable electricity and Latvian biogenic CO2 is a litre that doesn't get imported as fossil product. That's energy independence in its most concrete form — not a slogan, but cubic metres and barrels that stay out of the import column.
And it cuts the other way too. The Baltic states sit on growing renewable electricity potential and an expanding biomethane base. E-fuels are among the most tradable forms of clean energy — far easier to export than electrons across a constrained grid. A Latvia that produces compliant, RFNBO-grade e-fuels from indigenous feedstocks isn't just defending its own supply; it's positioned to export into a European market that, post-2041, will be hungry for exactly the biogenic-carbon-based fuels Latvia can make. Strengthening Latvia's resilience and Europe's at once, while decoupling both further from imported fossil energy.
The biomethane transition the Dienas Bizness article describes is the foundation. The biogenic CO2 it produces — captured instead of vented — is the bridge to e-fuels. And the e-fuels are where indigenous production becomes export potential.
Why we're flagging this now
We're treating this as the opening of a wider conversation. Over the coming weeks, the Latvian hydrogen ecosystem will keep returning to biogenic CO2 and carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) as recurring threads — because as e-fuel projects, plans and outlooks mature across the Baltics, the carbon question becomes unavoidable. Where the carbon comes from, whether it's biogenic or captured industrial, and how circular the full pathway is will increasingly separate the projects that get built from the ones that stall.
So read the Dienas Bizness piece for the biomethane outlook — it's a solid map of where Latvia is. Just don't stop at the methane. The half of biogas that used to float away might turn out to be the half that matters most.