Renewable natural gas is one of the quieter corners of the energy business, and it starts with something nobody thinks twice about: garbage. When food scraps, farm manure, and household trash decompose without oxygen, they give off methane, the same gas that makes up most conventional natural gas. Left alone, that methane drifts into the atmosphere, where it traps far more heat than carbon dioxide over the short term. Captured and cleaned, it becomes a fuel that can heat homes, generate electricity, or power trucks.
The process is fairly direct. Operators drill collection wells into landfills or install digesters at dairies and wastewater plants, then pipe the raw biogas through equipment that strips out carbon dioxide, moisture, and other impurities. What comes out is pipeline quality gas that is usually 96% to 98% methane, close enough to fossil natural gas that it can move through the same pipes and fuel the same engines. Once compressed, it is sold at stations as compressed natural gas, or CNG.
Two things make this attractive as a business rather than a science project. The first is that it solves a pollution problem and creates a product at the same time, turning a waste stream into something with a price tag. The second is policy. Federal and state programs, including the national Renewable Fuel Standard and California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, assign real monetary value to low-carbon fuels through tradable credits. Those credits often matter as much to the economics as the fuel itself.
The U.S. market is still young. The EPA estimates that only about one in five operating landfill gas projects currently produces RNG, which leaves a long runway for growth but also means the fueling and production network is being built piece by piece. That is where companies that own the plants, the pipelines, and the pumps come in.
One of the names building out that network is OPAL Fuels Inc. (NASDAQ: OPAL), a vertically integrated player that captures methane, turns it into RNG, and sells it through its own fueling stations. With a market value of roughly $379 million, it sits at the smaller end of the energy sector, and its story is less about splashy announcements than about steadily adding capacity, one site at a time.
The latest example came today when the company announced it had finished renovating a fueling station in Goshen, California, in the state’s Central Valley. OPAL bought the site in 2025 and spent the following year upgrading what had been an underused asset into a public station for heavy-duty fleets. The improvements added about 1.7 million gasoline gallon equivalents of new capacity, and the station is now expected to dispense roughly 14 million gasoline gallon equivalents of RNG and CNG over the next ten years.
The practical effect is local. Twelve fleets already fuel there, and the upgrade brings in Premier Ag Transportation while continuing to serve Western Milling and ten other regional customers. Faster fill times and a steadier local supply are the immediate wins. Over a year, OPAL projects the site will displace about 1.3 million gallons of diesel, which translates into cleaner air and quieter trucks along Central Valley roads.
Adam Comora, the company’s co-chief executive, framed the upgrade as evidence that fleet operators increasingly see the appeal. He described RNG as a working example of the circular economy, turning waste into fuel for the trucks that move goods, and said the company expects demand to keep climbing.
None of this is dramatic on its own. A single station upgrade in one California town is a small piece of a company that reports more than 350 completed fueling projects nationwide. But that is the nature of infrastructure. Value in this corner of the market accrues through throughput and the environmental credits that come with it, and both depend on the unglamorous work of adding capacity site by site. For readers new to the sector, Goshen is a useful snapshot of how a low-carbon fuel business actually grows, not in leaps, but in gallons.
