TL;DR
- Cardano Foundation announced two initiatives with Petrobras for blockchain traceability of sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel.
- The Book-and-Claim model separates the environmental benefit from the physical fuel and allows it to be assigned to airlines, companies, or individual passengers.
- The second project applies digital checkpoints to the Diesel R lifecycle to strengthen scope 3 emissions auditing.
The Cardano Foundation announced two new initiatives alongside Petrobras, the energy company controlled by the Brazilian state and one of the most valuable in Latin America.
Framed within a research and development collaboration, the projects apply Cardano’s public blockchain to two renewable products: sustainable aviation fuel —known as SAF— and Diesel R, Petrobras’s renewable diesel brand.
Both initiatives seek to address a specific problem: making environmental data and fuel lifecycles verifiable across increasingly fragmented supply chains.
Cardano Sets Its Sights on Sustainable Fuel
The SAF-related project brings together Petrobras, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro through its blockchain center Ledger Labs, and the Cardano Foundation.
The initiative employs a Book-and-Claim model, which separates the environmental benefit from the physical fuel to allow its assignment to an airline, company, or passenger, even when the SAF was produced or consumed elsewhere. The blockchain provides the traceable record that documents the origin of the benefit, to whom it was assigned, and that it was only claimed once.
The application also reaches the individual passenger: those who enter their origin and destination airports can calculate the corresponding amount of CS-SAF —the digital token representing the environmental benefit— and receive a certificate with their route, distance traveled, and allocation, linked to the original SAF certificate.
Traceability at Every Stage
The second project, also developed with PUC-Rio, applies the same infrastructure to the Diesel R lifecycle. The proposed model creates digital checkpoints at production, transport, and use stages, converting the information from each phase into a continuous record.
This is especially relevant for scope 3 emissions reporting —those generated indirectly along the value chain—, whose verification typically depends on data scattered across suppliers and logistics operators.
Rafael Fraga, Head of Business Development for Latin America at the Cardano Foundation, stated that “the energy transition will depend as much on trust as on new fuels.” Brazil’s oil and gas market is projected to reach $28.82 billion by 2031, underscoring the scale of the sector where these tools are beginning to take shape.
