Cardano Foundation announced two initiatives with Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled energy giant and one of Latin America’s most valuable companies, to apply Cardano’s public blockchain to renewable fuel traceability.
Framed within a research and development collaboration, the projects target two renewable products: sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and Diesel R, Petrobras’ renewable diesel brand. The goal is to make environmental data and fuel lifecycles verifiable across increasingly fragmented supply chains.
The SAF-related initiative brings together Petrobras, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro through its blockchain center Ledger Labs, and the Cardano Foundation. It uses a Book-and-Claim model, which separates the environmental benefit from the physical fuel and allows that benefit to be assigned to an airline, company, or passenger even when the SAF was produced or consumed elsewhere. The blockchain provides a traceable record documenting the origin of the benefit, the recipient, and that it was claimed only once.
Passengers can enter their origin and destination airports to 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.
The second project, also developed with PUC-Rio, applies the same infrastructure to the Diesel R lifecycle. It creates digital checkpoints at production, transport, and use stages, converting information from each phase into a continuous record. This is particularly relevant for scope 3 emissions reporting, which covers indirect emissions along the value chain and typically depends on data scattered across suppliers and logistics operators.
Rafael Fraga, Head of Business Development for Latin America at the Cardano Foundation, said that “the energy transition will depend as much on trust as on new fuels.” The announcement also notes 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.
