On April 2, a Chinese news agency reported that the state oil company Sinochem Energy Technology Co., a subsidiary of Sinochem Corporation, executed the first shipment of gasoline using blockchain technology for its management .

According to Xinhua, this gasoline export represents the first case in  which blockchain technology is used   in an energy transaction involving government departments. It would also be the first time that a blockchain-based system for the exchange of a commodity  includes all the indispensable parts in the process.

This cross-border shipment of gasoline landed from the Chinese city of Quanzhou bound for Singapore. In this pilot operation the distributed accounting technology was used for the digitization and storage of information and key documents of the commercial transaction: such as contracts, remittances of payment, proof of shipment and the rest referring to customs procedures.

Sinochem Group is an energy conglomerate owned by the Chinese Government that is mainly responsible for the production and exchange of chemicals and the exploitation of oil. This oil company had already been experimenting with blockchain technology, since last December it announced that it had completed the first simulated blockchain oil import transaction in that country.

After the aforementioned test last December,  the Chinese state oil company concluded that the blockchain technology could increase efficiency and considerably reduce costs in operations of this type, claiming that this technology is able to “significantly improve the efficiency of execution of transactions crude oil, optimizing 20% ​​-30% of financing costs “. For this reason, it is not surprising that a few months after this simulation they finally decided to apply this technology to a real transaction.

Other big companies have carried out conceptual tests with respect to the application of the blockchain in transactions related to oil, during last year the trade giant, Mercuria, made a successful proof of concept related to the ING Group and Société Générale banks. the blockchain technology that would allow the use of intelligent contracts to simplify some operations of the  general tracking and digitize the commercial transactions related to oil.