- Petrobras is testing the Cardano blockchain in two research projects to trace environmental claims tied to sustainable aviation fuel and its partly renewable Diesel R.
- The aviation project aims to prevent companies from counting the same emissions reduction twice, while the diesel project would create a record of the fuel’s production, transportation and use to support emissions reporting.
- Both projects remain in the research stage, with no disclosed timeline for broader deployment or details about the fuel volumes covered.
Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled energy company, is testing the Cardano blockchain to track claims about lower-carbon fuel, in two research projects announced Wednesday by the Cardano Foundation shared with CoinDesk.
One covers sustainable aviation fuel, a lower-carbon alternative to conventional jet fuel that can be used in existing aircraft and airports. The other covers Diesel R, Petrobras’ diesel made partly from renewable materials such as vegetable oils or animal fats.
“Brazil has been one of the most consistent adopters of Cardano, from SERPRO in government to SENAI in industry. It's great to see Petrobras, one of the largest firms in the region, continue to see value in on-chain provenance and traceability,” Frederik Gregaard, chief executive of the Cardano Foundation, told CoinDesk.
“Institutional interest in Cardano keeps growing, especially with x402 arriving on Cardano and Fireblocks adding support for Cardano Native Tokens. It's never been a better time for enterprises to consider what this technology offers,” Gregaard added.
The aviation project tackles a problem with how green fuel is sold. Under a model known as book-and-claim, an airline can pay for the environmental benefit of sustainable fuel even if the fuel itself is used elsewhere.
That arrangement needs a record of who owns the benefit and when it has been claimed, so two companies cannot count the same emissions reduction.
The application uses Cardano to record where each benefit originated, who received it and when it was claimed, helping prevent it from being counted twice.
In the real world, a passenger can enter their departure and destination airports, calculate the corresponding fuel benefit and receive a certificate linking their allocation back to the original fuel certificate.
On the other hand, the diesel project would record information at each stage of production, transportation and use, joining those records into a history of the fuel’s journey.
That could help companies report Scope 3 emissions, the indirect emissions across their suppliers and customers, where the information needed often sits with other businesses.
Both projects remain research work. The diesel model is described as proposed, and the announcement disclosed neither fuel volumes covered nor a timeline for wider use.
Cardano also joined x402 this month, a payment standard that lets apps and AI agents pay for data or computing services as they request them. Its initial payment-processing software had been tested on Cardano’s pre-production network, with commercial use on the live blockchain still to be demonstrated.
