Usinas de biogás: Onde o lixo e o esterco viram luz

Cerejo, Lucas Nakamura

doi:10.5281/zenodo.23482137

No. 028 Energy · biomass Bioenergy in São Paulo 1/4

Biogas plants

Where rubbish and manure become light

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Map of São Paulo state, with municipalities in light grey and the intermediate-region boundaries. Coloured dots mark 51 biogas plants: forest green for farming, plum for industry and deep blue for landfills and sewage, sized by scale and hollow when not in operation. Clay-coloured rings, proportional to capacity, mark the 13 biogas power stations registered with ANEEL; the largest, Termoverde Caieiras, gets an arrowed callout. The plants cluster around the city of São Paulo and in the north-centre of the state. — Fig. 028 São Paulo state (SP) EPSG:4674 Source: MapBiomas, ANEEL, IBGE

On top of a landfill in Caieiras, in Greater São Paulo, the gas rising from the rubbish drives the state’s largest biogas power station: 29.5 MW of licensed capacity. It is one of 13 biogas power stations registered with ANEEL in São Paulo, which together add up to 108.2 MW. MapBiomas maps other ways of using the same gas: 51 plants across the state, 44 of them in operation, burning manure from farms, industrial effluent and what comes out of landfills and sewage works to make electricity, heat or biomethane. On the map they gather around the capital and along the agro-industrial hubs of the interior. First plate of the collection “Bioenergy in São Paulo”, which follows waste all the way to energy.

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At a glance

Layers

usinas_biogas point 51 biogas plants: category, main use, status, scale and start of operations
ute_biogas point 13 biogas power stations registered with ANEEL, with capacity (kW)
municipios polygon 645 municipalities, with the number of plants and biogas capacity
regioes_intermediarias polygon 11 intermediate geographic regions
limite_estadual polygon State boundary

Metadata

Sources: MapBiomas — infrastructure database: biogas plants
ANEEL — Generation Information System (SIGA), as published in the MapBiomas infrastructure database (2022)
IBGE — Municipal Mesh 2025 (2025)
Extent: São Paulo state (SP)
CRS / Projection: SIRGAS 2000 (EPSG:4674)
EPSG:4674
Software: Python · GeoPandas · GDAL · QGIS · Node.js · d3-geo
Method: MapBiomas biogas plants and SIGA biogas power stations clipped to São Paulo state and assigned to municipalities by spatial join.
Version: v1.0.0
Licence: CC BY 4.0
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23482137

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The map without a frame, with legend, scale, reference system and credit written on it: ready for papers, lectures and slides. In two versions: with the basemap (neighbours and sea) or only the mapped area, on white.

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How to cite

Cerejo, L. N. (2026). Usinas de biogás: onde o lixo e o esterco viram luz [Biogas plants: Where rubbish and manure become light] (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23482137

@dataset{cerejo2026_usinas_de_biogas_sp,
  author    = {Cerejo, Lucas Nakamura},
  title     = {Usinas de biogás: Onde o lixo e o esterco viram luz},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23482137},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23482137},
  language  = {portuguese},
  note      = {English title: Biogas plants: Where rubbish and manure become light. Licence CC BY 4.0}
}

How to read this plate area, projection, scale, legend and source · 6 terms

1 Area: São Paulo state (SP) The area the plate covers. Outside it, neighbours and sea are drawn in grey, just for orientation.
2 Coordinates and projection: SIRGAS 2000 (EPSG:4674) The layers are in SIRGAS 2000; the drawing’s projection is written in the colophon at the foot of the panel.
3 Scale: Graphic scale bar in the panel The scale bar is true on the central meridian; away from it, measured distances vary a little.
4 Legend and layers: 5 layers in the GeoPackage · point, polygon Read the legend before the map: it tells you whether a colour is a rate or a class, and whether a circle is a total.
5 Sources: MapBiomas; ANEEL (2022); IBGE (2025) Every figure comes from a public source, with its year. The data sheet gives each one’s address.

Terms on this plate

Biogas: The gas from the airless breakdown (anaerobic digestion) of organic waste: manure, vinasse, sewage sludge, rubbish. It is 50% to 70% methane; the rest is mostly CO₂.
Biomethane: Biogas upgraded, with most of the CO₂ removed, to ANP’s specification, at which point it replaces natural gas in the pipeline, in industry and in the lorry’s tank.
Landfill and open dump: A sanitary landfill is an engineered site: sealed ground, leachate and gas drainage. An open dump is tipping in the open air, banned by Brazil’s National Solid Waste Policy. Landfill gas is biogas.
Land cover and land use: What covers each patch of ground (forest, pasture, soy, cane, water, town), read from satellite images year by year. The forty-year plates use MapBiomas’ series, 1985 to 2025, summed by municipality.
MapBiomas: A network of universities, NGOs and companies that classifies land cover across all of Brazil from Landsat images, one map a year since 1985, as open data.
ANEEL: Brazil’s National Electricity Agency: it registers every power plant and distributed-generation system, with source, capacity and municipality.

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Full record and citation

Method notes · No. 028

Biogas plants in São Paulo state

Português · English

Plate No. 028, the first of four in the collection Bioenergy in São Paulo: where biogas is already put to use. The next plates show where the feedstock comes from — livestock and cane — and where bagasse becomes electricity.

What the files contain

Layer (GPKG)	Geometry	Contents
`usinas_biogas`	point	51 MapBiomas plants: `categoria` (farming, industry, landfill or sewage), `uso_principal`, energy uses (`energia_eletrica`, `energia_termica`, `energia_mecanica`, `biometano`), `situacao`, `porte`, `inicio_operacao`, municipality
`ute_biogas`	point	13 SIGA biogas power stations: `nome`, `ceg`, `combustivel`, `fase`, `potencia_kw` (licensed), `potencia_fiscalizada_kw`, `inicio_operacao`, `proprietario`, municipality
`municipios`	polygon	645 municipalities: `usinas_biogas` (count) and `ute_biogas_kw` (total capacity)
`regioes_intermediarias`	polygon	11 intermediate geographic regions
`limite_estadual`	polygon	outline of the state

The GPKG is zipped and attached to the bioenergia-sp-2026 release. It carries QGIS styles: plants coloured by category and sized by scale (hollow when not in operation), and power stations as rings proportional to capacity, with their names.

The CSV combines both point layers (column camada), with longitude and latitude in decimal degrees, in UTF-8.

Method

Biogas plants from the MapBiomas infrastructure database, filtered by the state field (SP). The layer does not report biogas output (the field is zero for every plant), so dot size follows the declared scale.
SIGA (ANEEL) power stations fuelled by biogas — Biogás – RU, Biogás-AGR and Biogás – Floresta — in the version published by MapBiomas. Capacity is the licensed figure, in kW.
Each point receives the code of the municipality it falls in, by spatial join with IBGE’s 2025 Municipal Mesh.
On the plate, ring area is proportional to capacity; both layers appear together because the same plant may be in both databases.

Limitations

The two databases share no common identifier: it is not possible to say which MapBiomas plants match which ANEEL power stations, and adding the two counts would double-count some of them.
The MapBiomas layer records operations starting up to October 2019; the SIGA layer, up to June 2022. Newer plants are missing. The current SIGA release, on ANEEL’s open data portal, can be used to update the ute_biogas layer.
Plants that only flare their biogas, without using the energy, are in neither database.

View this map’s folder on GitHub