India Dairy Biogas Program

Audit Analysis

The India Dairy Biogas Program is a Gold Standard biogas heat-displacement project with VVB-confirmed additionality and no reversal events, but it is undermined by an extensive list of data-quality findings, a project-specific baseline without a documented reassessment date, and multiple cross-document contradictions (notably on the fNRB method and safeguards documentation). The conservative usage-rate assumption (0.90 assumed vs. 0.99 verified) and the inherently low permanence risk of a heat-displacement design provide some claim-safety margin, yet the volume of unresolved corrective actions and medium extraction confidence limit confidence in the reported figures.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠30+ material findings and 30+ corrective actions identified in the verification report, including hardcoded ER values, inconsistent emission factors between the MR and PDD, and missing QA/QC rows
• ⚠fNRB method contradiction: the verification report (Oct 2024) records a local-field method while a later monitoring report (Dec 2025) references a national-default method, and a Design Change to update fNRB is in progress
• ⚠Safeguards documentation is inconsistent: the latest verification report (Feb 2025) does not mention safeguards, while an earlier verification (Oct 2024) did; FPIC and grievance mechanism are confirmed but the broader safeguards narrative is absent
• ⚠Ownership conflict involving 1,038 units registered under another registry was identified and resolved, but the corrective actions still require full documentation of cancelled and replacement units
• ⚠No buffer pool percentage is stated in any available document, and the baseline last-reassessment date is not found in the extracted record

Credit Vintages