16 Farm News First > BetterFarming.com Better Farming August 2016 Ontario renewable natural gas venture In Ontario, Rural Green Energy, a company in Oxford County, is embarking on a similar initiative and plans to open its first compressed natural gas fuelling station in the fall. The station will be located south of Highway 401 at Woodstock. Rural Green opened a temporary station in May across from the future location. Faromor Ltd. is Rural Green’s engineering consul- tant, and Nick Hendry, Faromor’s sales engineer, says in June the company plans to develop an anaerobic digester to supply the fuelling station. Hendry says he believes wholeheart- edly in the potential of anaerobic diges- tion to generate renewable fuels. By capturing gases like methane and using it as a fuel for some- thing like trucking, “anaerobic digestion is very close to carbon neutral or carbon negative even,” when materials such as dairy farm waste and curbside waste form the main feedstock, he says. “If you start using field crops (for the digester), you’re in the 30 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions of traditional fossil fuels.” Hendry says that other than its size, the anaerobic digester, which will be built on the beef farm of John Ysselstein Jr. (one of Rural Green Energy’s five partners), will basically be the same as one used to generate electricity. Designs change based on the feedstock available – not on the facility’s output. So an on-farm digester to process cattle manure is different from one that handles wastewater or one using solid curb- side waste or another that processes sweet corn or purposely-grown crops. Costs of erecting a digester, no matter its use, range from $1 to $2 million. Adding the equipment to clean and ready the gas for use as fuel today can be done for as little as $500,000, but equipment that makes the system financially justifiable costs around $2 million, he says. “You’re looking at four times the size of the typical on-farm digester right now.” Different sources of biogas have different characteristics. Methane sourced from landfills is more con- taminated. Pig manure has a much lower energy value than, say, cattle manure because pigs are so efficient at converting feed to meat. The Ysselstein digester will generate methane from the 2,000- head beef cattle feedlot, an adjacent cow-calf operation, and Ysselstein’s parents’ 200-head dairy and heifer replacement operation nearby. This pump supplies compressed natural gas to vehicles and is part of a temporary station owned by Rural Green Energy, an Oxford County company that plans to open a compressed natural gas station south of Woodstock later this year. MAIN FEATURE