The Egyptian government started implementing the smart card system for heavy fuel oil and diesel supplied to factories and power plants as well as bakeries in order to supervise the distribution of petroleum products and stop leakage in black markets, reported Al Borsa.

The Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum’s First Undersecretary of Transmission, Mohamed Othman, stated that implementing the 1^st phase of the fuel smart cards system in 2013 prevented smuggling around 16,000 tons of petroleum products. He added that the first phase was the transmission of petroleum products from warehouses to filling stations, while the 2^nd phase is related to distributing products from filling stations to consumers.

Othman explained that the smart cards are being distributed to electricity station to enable them to receive their needs of diesel and mazut from distribution vehicles. In addition, 940 brick factories received their smart cards to receive mazut as the factories that do not own cards have no rights to any fuel. The Ministry of Petroleum assigned every factory shares based on its production capacity. Thus, licensed factories that did not receive their cards yet, should present required documentation to issue cards.