18 Farm News First > BetterFarming.com Better Farming August 2016 MAIN FEATURE Father and son team John Jr. and John Sr. Ysselstein of Oxford County are among Rural Green Energy’s five partners. The company is working to establish a compressed natural gas station south of Woodstock to fuel vehicles. Plans are also in the works to generate renewable natural gas by developing an anaerobic digester at John Jr.’s 2,000-head cattle finishing operation. pick-ups and vans. He says a couple of haulers for milk and grain have also converted their highway tractors. The gas will be cleaned on the farm, piped to a Union Gas process- ing station outside of Woodstock to be blended at a rate of 10 per cent with the fossil-based natural gas, and then piped to the natural gas station. No infrastructure currently links the Ysselstein operation to the natural gas grid. Over the phone, Ysselstein Sr. sounds confident they can convince Union Gas to lay the pipe. Their farm won’t be the only customer. “There’s Gunn’s Hill cheese plant (owned by another son) – they use a lot of propane – and my neighbour across the road has got a propane large corn dryer.” Motivating expansion through renewables Players in both Ontario’s biogas and farm industry say renewable natural gas projects can help make the extension of natural gas infrastruc- ture into rural areas financially viable for gas companies. Ian Nokes, energy and environ- mental economic policy analyst with the Ontario Federation of Agricul- ture (OFA), says proposals that Union Gas and Enbridge have submitted to the Ontario Energy Board reveal rural gas infrastructure will be pricey. In its 2015 proposal, Union Gas outlines plans to extend service to Milverton in Wellington County, Prince Township outside of Sault Ste. Marie and Lambton Shores, as well as First Nations communities at Kettle Point, Stoney Creek, Walpole Island and Moraviantown. To do so, the company said it wanted to raise existing users’ rates and obtain financial support from the new municipalities and future users. If it doesn’t tap resources of existing users, up-front costs for the expansion would cost $68 million, or the equivalent of a more than $7,000 up-front charge for the first 9,000 cus- tomers, a company submission says. The natural gas expansion funding to be detailed in the fall will likely help with those costs, but Nokes says the renewable natural gas funding further encourages companies to address rural areas. Connections to renewables projects can help the companies reach their targets of two per cent renewable natural gas by 2020 and up to 16 per cent by 2030. (The Canadian gas industry voluntary targets are five per cent by 2025 and 10 per cent by 2030.) Pressure to add renewables comes from both Ontario’s carbon cap-and-trade