From organics to low-carbon fuel: What can complex RNG builds teach us?

Complex energy projects rarely fail because the technology breaks down. They fail because familiar constraints are underestimated: structural limitations, legacy ground conditions and live operational interfaces. The kind of factors that sit in the background of project planning until they become the risks that define the outcome. On complex sites, those risks rarely remain isolated. They interact, amplify and surface late, when options are limited and decisions are expensive.

The City of Toronto’s renewable natural gas project at the Disco Road Organics Processing Facility (DROPF) is a case in point. Delivered on a former landfill within an operating waste transfer facility, the project captures biogas generated from source-separated post-consumer organic waste. Instead of being flared, the gas is upgraded to utility pipeline-grade renewable natural gas.

The fuel now supports municipal vehicle fleets and building heat, transforming an underutilised site into a productive energy asset. While the technical solution is documented elsewhere, the more instructive story lies in how continuity across design, construction, commissioning and operations shaped delivery and outcomes.

This was an RNG project, but the delivery lessons apply well beyond gas. Similar dynamics now define hydrogen facilities, energy-from-waste plants, water reuse schemes and other decarbonisation assets delivered on live, legacy sites. In every case, process alone isn't enough. What separates delivery from disruption is integration, continuity of accountability and early engagement with how the site operates.

One of the earliest sources of friction on complex RNG and other projects is the assumption that standards align by default. In practice, agricultural, European and utility-grade expectations often diverge, particularly around quality assurance, testing regimes and performance thresholds.

On this project, those gaps were managed through sustained, detailed coordination between design, procurement and commissioning teams, not resolved in a single phase.

Testing requirements, documentation standards and acceptance criteria all needed to be locked down well before systems came online. That meant integrating procurement and design conversations much earlier than many teams would expect. When expectations were aligned early, risks reduced.

Owners and project teams need to define utility-grade expectations from the outset and ensure vendors are contractually aligned. Without that, commissioning inherits problems created months earlier.

When new energy infrastructure is added to an operating facility, the site does not pause around the project. Waste continues to move, processing systems remain live and operators retain accountability for day-to-day performance. Technical design alone doesn't cover it.

While engaging operators early and consistently was essential, it also exposed something less obvious. Understanding a facility requires more than reviewing operating manuals or process diagrams. The way a site runs, how systems respond under different conditions and what operators can realistically control often differs from documented assumptions.

Ongoing conversation with operations ran through every phase of construction and commissioning, not as a formality, but as a working input. What looks manageable on paper often shifts once new and existing systems start to meet. The interfaces tell a different story.

Digital tools and remote collaboration have reshaped how projects are run. On complex energy builds, there is still no substitute for technical leadership on the ground at critical moments.

Commissioning requires teams to work through operational ranges with vendors, observe system behaviour in real time and make decisions that reflect the integrated process, not individual components. That's especially the case when multiple operational teams, each responsible for different parts of the infrastructure, need to come together around a shared goal: a whole working system, not just a set of contractual obligations met in isolation.

Being “on the ground” allowed issues to be resolved quickly, avoided prolonged outages and reduced escalation across multiple parties. In complex environments, compressing decision cycles can be the difference between controlled commissioning and extended disruption.

Commissioning is often treated as an end-phase activity. In practice, it is the point at which risk converges. For major projects, this phase behaves differently to conventional plants because multiple vendor systems must operate as a single, integrated process.

Three things stood out from the Toronto experience and they tend to repeat across complex energy and RNG builds:

• Baseline readiness matters more than optimisation. Each system must be fully tested and stable in isolation before integrated commissioning begins. Problems introduced upstream tend to surface here, often under time pressure.
• System behaviour matters more than component performance. Proving that individual packages meet spec is necessary, but it's not the point. The real test is how those systems interact across operating ranges and under real conditions, particularly when different entities are responsible for different assets within the same process.
• Operator involvement reduces downstream friction. When operations staff are embedded during commissioning, knowledge transfer happens earlier and troubleshooting during live operations becomes faster and more predictable.

This places heightened responsibility on the general contractor to coordinate readiness across all systems and vendors. Commissioning isn't the finish line. It's the system integration phase and it should be planned that way from the start.

Industrial and urban RNG projects will increasingly be delivered on constrained, legacy sites where structural, operational and integration risks overlap. Success depends on continuity. Integrated teams, early operational engagement and commissioning-led thinking are not optional extras. They are the foundations that allow complex energy assets to move from concept to reliable operation.