Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled energy company, is testing the Cardano blockchain to track claims about lower-carbon fuel in two research projects the Cardano Foundation announced on Sept. 30. One covers sustainable aviation fuel, and the other covers Diesel R, Petrobras’ renewable diesel made partly from vegetable oils and animal fats.
The aviation work centers on a platform named CS-SAF, built with PUC-Rio University’s Ledger Labs, that turns each sustainable aviation fuel attribute into a standardized token on Cardano with metadata aligned to the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). Tokens can be minted, transferred, consulted and retired, so a single emissions claim can only be made once.
Closing the double-counting gap in green fuel
The project targets a known weakness in how sustainable fuel is sold. Under a book-and-claim model, an airline can pay for the environmental benefit of sustainable aviation fuel even when the physical fuel is burned elsewhere, so the system needs a record of who owns each benefit and when it was claimed. On Cardano, the application records where a benefit originated, who received it and when it was claimed, and a passenger can enter departure and destination airports to receive a certificate linking their allocation back to the original fuel certificate.
A fuel trail from refinery to Scope 3 reporting
The diesel project records 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 spread across suppliers and customers where the underlying data 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’s institutional momentum in Brazil
“Brazil has been one of the most consistent adopters of Cardano, from SERPRO in government to SENAI in industry,” Frederik Gregaard, chief executive of the Cardano Foundation, said. “It’s great to see Petrobras, one of the largest firms in the region, continue to see value in on-chain provenance and traceability.” The fuel work extends Cardano’s enterprise push, which includes Fireblocks opening Cardano Native Tokens to institutions and a broader expansion of integrations and partnerships. Rafael Fraga, the foundation’s LATAM business development lead, said the energy transition will depend as much on trust as on new fuels, and that a public blockchain offers a shared, verifiable foundation for energy markets.
