The focus of this research is commoditizing environmental credits into standardized units by guaranteeing the provenance of the credit through the application of blockchain technology. The commoditization occurs by creating a decentralized clearing process using blockchain for the environmental credit market. The cleared standardized commodity units can then potentially be traded without the risk of rejection by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because of production fraud or errors. The removal of the rejection risk would allow for small farmers, municipal wastewater plants and landfills to enhance their profitability by producing green electricity from biogas and receiving market tradable environmental credits. The complexity of the pathway requires blockchain, which creates an immutable ledger holding production and distribution data for the environmental credit. This immutable ledger supplies provenance that can eliminate counterparty risk when combined with the concept of decentralized clearing of the credits.
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