Government Incentives:
Tax Credits and Energy Attributes
Overview
Governments already pay for environmental performance. Tax credits, renewable attributes, and their European equivalents are statutory entitlements with registries, documentation standards, and observable prices. This vertical monetizes what the platform’s own projects generate, then trades the same instruments for third parties.
A statutory market, not a voluntary one: Section 6418 of the Internal Revenue Code allows qualifying clean-energy and carbon-management credits to be sold for cash to unrelated taxpayers. The buyer receives a reduction in federal tax liability, not an environmental claim. Transferability survived the 2025 tax legislation intact, and the market has continued to price and clear through the change.
Our verticals are the supply: Methane and carbon-management projects generate 45Q. Renewable natural gas and clean fuels generate 45Z. Renewable siting and agrivoltaics on land the platform owns generate investment and production credits. 1NatCap is a natural seller into this market before it is a participant in it, which is the correct order.
The same mechanic travels across jurisdictions: A government creates an attribute, separates it from the physical product, and requires or incentivizes its retirement. That is Section 6418 in the United States, Renewable Energy Certificates under state portfolio standards, and Guarantees of Origin across the European Union and EEA. Different statutes, one instrument design.
Instruments
Market Context
Our Approach
Internal supply first: Credits generated inside the platform are registered, documented, and monetized through this vertical rather than sold away at the project level. The margin stays in the group.
Principal, not brokerage: We take positions in credits and attributes, warehouse them, and sell forward, in the same way Merchant Markets holds physical and contractual exposure. Agency transactions are a service line, not the business model.
Diligence and risk transfer discipline: Pre-filing registration, eligible basis substantiation, chain of title, seller indemnity, and tax insurance where the counterparty credit does not carry the recapture exposure on its own. Foreign entity restrictions introduced in 2025 are screened at intake.
Timing and basis: Credits are dated, jurisdictional, and seasonal. Value accrues to the party that can hold across tax years, aggregate small sellers into transactable size, and price the spread between forward commitment and spot.
Separation from outcome instruments: A tax credit is a domestic fiscal entitlement. A Renewable Energy Certificate is an attribute claim. An Article 6 mitigation outcome is neither. They are documented, sold, and retired separately, and never stacked in a way that represents the same environmental result twice.
Exclusions
Why This Sits Inside the Platform
Every operating vertical on this platform produces government-created attributes as a by-product of doing the primary business. A methane capture project produces 45Q. An RNG upgrade produces 45Z. Solar sited on owned farmland produces investment credits and RECs. Most operators sell those attributes once, early, at whatever the first buyer offers, because monetizing them is not their business. It is ours. The vertical exists because a platform that already owns the projects, the registry infrastructure, and the pricing data has a structural advantage in a market where the discount to face value is the entire margin, and because the same desk that clears its own supply can clear everyone else’s.
Whether you're an institutional investor, sovereign partner, project developer, or industry participant, we're building the platform that transforms environmental outcomes into institutional-quality assets. Let's shape the next generation of natural capital markets together.
