You may have heard of the carbon asset market, where companies buy and sell permits that allow them to emit one ton of CO2 per carbon credit depending on whether they over emit or under emit. However, this is a rather elusive trade and does not necessarily promote lower emittance or green technology if there are always carbon credits on the market. In order to bring efficiency to carbon asset trading and expand on its potential environmental benefits by removing the data gap between green technology and finance, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) created Energy Blockchain Labs in 2018. Energy Blockchain Labs integrates the carbon asset development ledger with an IBM-backed universal distributed ledger to record and quantify a participant’s environmental impact from their energy production and consumption activities. As a blockchain, it securely stores the participants’ information and provides transparency for all stakeholders, allowing them to track the carbon footprint. Participants are able to assess when to buy and sell carbon assets and regulators are able to monitor progress against emittance quotas, allowing them to better implement measures to ensure the participant meets carbon reduction goals. Having been established in China, so far, high-emitting participants experience a 20 to 50% reduction in CO2 emittance after ten months and green technology has been promoted widely with funds being channelled to low-emitting participants and invested into green energy. Green energy in China has seen very little growth, mostly because of cost, but Energy Blockchain Labs has started to reverse this and is actually strengthening the green economy, making it more adaptable and efficient by being a part of the new energy market dynamics. It may be too soon to speak to the success of Energy Blockchain Labs, as there is little mention of how they gain the emittance data from participants and if it could potentially be warped, but by targeting China—who emits 25% of all CO2—the impact could be great.

Andoni, M., Robu, V., Flynn, D., Abram, S., Geach, D., Jenkins, D., McCallum, P. and Peacock, A., 2019. Blockchain technology in the energy sector: A systematic review of challenges and opportunities. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 100, pp.143-174.

Energy Blockchain Labs Inc. (2018, January). Retrieved from https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/energy-blockchain-labs-inc?mhq=carbon assets&mhsrc=ibmsearch_a