The natural gas industry, with its large number of stakeholders and complex supply chain interactions, represents a great opportunity for end-to-end digitization with potential for significant cost savings and business opportunities. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has awarded $86,100 to Mavennet Systems, Inc., based in Toronto, Canada, to extend its Neoflow platform to digitally trace natural gas supply chains between Canada and the U.S. The Phase 1 award was made under S&T’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP) re-release of its Preventing Forgery & Counterfeiting of Certificates and Licenses solicitation, which sought standards-based blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) solutions to fulfill additional needs across DHS missions.
In this Phase 1 award, Mavennet is enhancing its Neoflow platform to enable U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in modernizing the processes associated with natural gas imports to provide end-to-end traceability and digital certainty to address lack of transparency in natural gas exchange; manual processes; and risk and costs arising from errors and misrepresentation. Regulators have struggled to get an end-to-end view of the supply chain, react to changes in the industry landscape, and drive evidence-based policymaking. Extending the Neoflow platform to natural gas will increase the transparency in natural gas exchanges between Canada and the U.S., connect supply chain documentation (e.g., purchase orders, bills of lading) to related import/export declaration, and account for in-route storage and resale.
“The implementation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement requires validating point of origin and supply chain traceability of continuous flow imports such as natural gas,” said Anil John, SVIP technical director. “Mavennet is adapting its Neoflow platform to provide this capability for natural gas imported from Canada into the U.S. in a globally interoperable manner, by utilizing open W3C standards and specifications such as Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers.”
Mavennet was also awarded an SVIP Phase 1 award for its “Blockchain-as-a-service for Cross-Border Oil Exchange” project in 2019 under the first release of this solicitation.
