Earlier this year, The Atlantic Council released a report entitled, "Ready for Take off? Aviation Biofuels Past, Present, and Future." As biofuels continue to become commonplace in the energy world, there is a higher likelihood that fraud will take place. As a matter of fact, late last year, two brothers were accused of participating in a $511 million biofuel fraud scheme. Cutting-edge technology when combine with multi-attribute standards, if put in place early, could shape the future of sustainable fuel certification, while minimizing or even eliminating biofuel fraud. Check out an excerpt from the report below to learn about a couple companies working towards these long term solutions.
"Whether it’s a fair burden for the sustainable fuel industry to bear or not, full transparency about and 100 percent accuracy in the characteristics, environmental attributes, and sourcing of sustainable fuel will determine user confidence. [Independent] organizations such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) among others have risen up to answer the challenge in providing a third-party, multi-stakeholder, multi-attribute standard to assess sustainable fuels throughout the supply chain. However effective a standard might be, issues of accuracy, speed, and cost will be paramount to wide-scale market adoption of any standard.
One Swiss company, SICPA, which has long provided secure and technologically advanced identification, traceability, and authentication solutions for governments and companies, proposes a technical solution that may be able to enhance or provide alternative compliance pathways for existing sustainable fuel standards. The proposed solution is straightforward: combine in-product, covert nanotechnology liquid markers with blockchain, the purportedly incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions. Originally designed for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, blockchain has since succeeded in enabling secure transactions among people or businesses who know nothing about one another.
As is being contemplated, the secure and covert fuel markers, when combined with mobile fuel analyzers, would permit fuels to be marked at any point in the supply chain, allowing controls to be implemented at the point of production. Blockchain solutions, in turn, would register all entities that provide data in the supply-chain ecosystem and secure the event data throughout production and distribution.
If SICPA’s hypothesis for the sustainable fuel market is correct, this combined capability could enhance the adoption of existing market standards, ensuring that sustainable fuels are distributed and sold without adulteration in a fair and transparent business environment and protecting the producers and users alike from the specter of fraud."
Get the full report here: Ready for Take off? Aviation Biofuels: Past, Present, and Future