Two unlikely words are center stage in renewable natural gas markets as 2026 begins: “dispensing capacity.”
Resolving worsening midstream constraints are crucial to a reassertion of fundamentals in pricing for renewable natural gas (RNG) and pricing for the associated lucrative D3 RIN certificates that underpin trade in the energy transition commodity.
Sellers of lucrative D3 RIN certificates have struggled with increasing intensity over the last two years to find “dispensing capacity” as the number of fueling stations that can easily shift from brown gas – to matching with available renewable natural gas flows in the pipeline system has shrunk almost to zero.
While some dispensing capacity is clearly still be available to source the D3 RINs that must be associated 1:1 with fueling activity, it is in niche areas like last mile delivery or still only gradually coming online.
For years, the slow buildout of RNG production meant that dispensing capacity wasn’t a problem market participants needed to solve. With plenty of brown gas dispensing capacity built over the preceding decades to accommodate fitful large-scale efforts to embed domestic US natural gas molecules into the US fuel system, especially for heavy transport otherwise reliant on imported refined products, RNG price forecasts were built around federal government policy that imposed demand urgency and scant supply availability.
A blend of tax credits, encouraging local and regional efforts, and capital market enthusiasm for RNG has now eaten up much of the available uncommitted dispensing capacity. The ways those elements can continue to boost available supply into a system where demand is now constrained as much by physical throughput limitation as by policy-led demand is confounding market outlooks.
The emergence of a new, additional dimension in forecasting RNG pricing has prompted Noreva to develop a pair of dispensing models that map out conservative, base case and aggressive outlooks for 1. the growth of compressed natural gas dispensing capacity – and 2. the share of renewable natural gas dispensing capacity that could be secured under different scenarios for that fuel.
Physical chokepoints in commodity markets have a history of making or breaking fortunes for investors and producers who must match supply and demand even as delivery realities shift with changing logistics priorities. A race to further bolster US gas pipeline infrastructure could appear to make dispensing optionality easier, but without the end-use demand from heavy transport the fueling points required to create the D3 RINs may never get built.
Noreva’s new CNG Dispensing and RNG Dispensing models forecast across nine different operating futures for each year over the next 25 years. As RNG has become a core part of the national transportation market, the future path for physical dispensing now rivals in importance policymakers’ collective appetite for low-CI molecules.
For more on Noreva’s CNG and RNG market coverage, and our Dispensing forecasts, contact sales@noreva.ai
