Saudi Arabia To Try Using Blockchain Officially

Blockchain technology has been seeing widespread adoption in various sectors now, and as per recently published reports, Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil and gas company, is slated to run a pilot program with blockchain technology, with the purpose of verifying the origin and quality of petroleum products.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s third largest oil-producing nation and if they successfully manage to implement this new tech, it could be the next step towards a massive technological overhaul in the oil industry. Reports say that the state-owned oil monopoly Saudi Aramco will be running this blockchain pilot in order to address issues the oil and gas giant has with traceability and quality control. The ultimate goal here is to figure out a foolproof method of tracing products back to their original production lines.

If the pilot is successful, then blockchain technology would allow Saudi Aramco to validate the entire supply chain, which in turn would assure greater quality control and would further provide them with the possibility to monitor all interactions by supply chain participants during the life cycle of the crude products. This will help in improving efficiency and accountability. Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, Saudi Aramco’s chief technology officer revealed that Aramco is very interested in using the blockchain technology. He said,

‘We are evaluating, it has a lot of advantages in ensuring the quality of the product and the source of the product… There are a lot of challenges in identifying sources of production and also for tracking quality, in which we think there is an opportunity to utilize blockchain. We are interested in it, we are testing it in some applications.’

Reports also were circulating that Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Economy and Planning, Mohammed bin Mazyad Altwaijri and Mohammad bin Abdullah Al Gergawi, the Emirati Minister of Cabinet Affairs and The Future, had announced the launch of the Saudi-Emariti Pilot Cryptocurrency.

Rishma Banerjee

Rishma is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has a special place in her life for sifting through all sorts of random trivia, thank you very much.