Digitalizing Sustainable Supply Chains: The Mediating Role of Blockchain and IoT Technologies in Mitigating Institutional Pressures for Scope 1–3 Traceability in Emerging Oil Markets

• Abey Litty

  Texas University

  Author

The global oil and gas industry faces escalating institutional pressures—coercive, normative, and mimetic—to achieve comprehensive Scope 1–3 emissions traceability across increasingly complex supply chains. Existing manual reporting systems, characterized by spreadsheet-based errors, opaque data provenance, and settlement cycles extending up to 90 days, prove inadequate for emerging market operators confronting both regulatory mandates and ESG financing requirements. This study proposes a predictive digitalization framework wherein blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies function as mediating mechanisms transforming institutional pressures into actionable traceability outcomes. Drawing on institutional theory and the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework, a hybrid architecture integrating Hyperledger Fabric permissioned ledgers with IoT-enabled real-time monitoring across upstream, midstream, and downstream operations is designed and validated. Through retrospective analysis of 144 oil and gas firms operating in Nigeria and quantitative simulation of 10,000 transaction records, the proposed framework demonstrates 89.4% traceability accuracy for Scope 1–3 emissions, representing a 41.2% improvement over baseline manual methods. System testing confirms throughput of 2.49 transactions per second with 398.8 ms average latency , while automated reporting reduces manual reporting time by 75% and eliminates spreadsheet-based errors . Key findings reveal that IoT-enabled measurement systems predict 73.4% of traceability variance, with blockchain immutability contributing 61.8% to institutional trust. The framework further enables product-level carbon differentiation, allowing certified barrels to trade at premium while addressing the "two-tier" market risk confronting smaller producers . These findings provide a replicable, technically validated pathway for oil-producing developing economies to achieve Scope 1–3 compliance while securing sustainability-linked financing.

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