Natural Resources committee  I should also clarify—

Natural Resources committee  The cost of $107 a tonne is a regional cost. The region manages all the waste garbage transfer stations and the landfill. It is the city's responsibility to collect the waste. Our savings are entirely on our waste collection system, which is on the backs of the taxpayers. The regional system is also on the backs of the taxpayers, but it's dispersed among 22 municipalities versus waste collection in Surrey, which is dispersed just through our own customer base.

Natural Resources committee  I think part of the problem in Canada, and in North America in general, is the lack of faith in CNG in general. CNG technology took off in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but the technology at that time wasn't quite where it is today. The cost of natural gas back then was on par with the cost of gasoline and diesel.

Natural Resources committee  To answer your question from an operator's perspective, these vehicles are operated by a city contractor. They have not experienced any such issues. To clarify, we're using compressed natural gas and not liquefied natural gas, so some of the problems you are asking about are with respect to LNG and not CNG.

Natural Resources committee  I'll refer you to slide 14. If you look at the fourth bullet, we're estimating a cost savings of approximately $600,000 a year. Actually, at this time it's going to be slightly higher than that given that it's going to a facility that's basically taking the material and composting it into a mulch or nutrient-rich compost.

Natural Resources committee  If your question is relative to the size of the facility, we determined that 80,000 tonnes a year based on the size of the land. We have city-owned property where the facility will be established. With that, we then looked at our entire customer base to determine what kind of feedstock we could generate to deliver to an 80,000 tonnes a year facility.

Natural Resources committee  We're going to contribute 50% of feedstock to the facility. Based on the results to date, it appears we'll likely be running 40,000 tonnes a year. It will be closer to 50,000 tonnes a year, based on high participation from 100% of our customer base.

Natural Resources committee  It's approximately $68 million.

Natural Resources committee  Correct. By mid-2015.

Natural Resources committee  Off the top of my head, that is the average for the three months; that's correct. For the month of October we were approximately at 68% diversion. For the month of November we were at 74.5% diversion. Then in December, we dropped back to 68.2% diversion, in and around there. The basis for the drop in December is that generally we produce much less yard waste in the month of December.

Natural Resources committee  I'll conclude the presentation. There are three slides left with respect to what's left in our plan. We are about to embark on a request for qualification process to attract a partner to develop the biofuel facility. The city is very grateful to have received funding from the P3 Canada Fund, late in 2012.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Councillor Hayne. Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. I'm Rob Costanzo. I'm the deputy manager of operations for the City of Surrey. You have in front of you a PowerPoint presentation. I'm going to reference each slide as I go through it. Slide 4 illustrates the high-level four-phase approach the city engaged to implement its system.