Measuring sustainability of renewable diesel production using a multi-criteria decision matrix

This study presents a multi-criteria decision matrix approach to the sustainability analysis of renewable diesel processes. The criteria include environmental, economic, technical, and fuel-quality aspects. The main objective is to establish a comprehensive approach to the sustainability analysis of alternative manufacturing processes. A combination of an analytical hierarchy process method and an entropy method is used to obtain both subjective and objective weighting factors to achieve a more reliable and comprehensive comparison among alternatives. The technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is used to rank the alternatives based on the distance of each alternative to the ideal and non-ideal solutions. This analysis indicates that the most sustainable processes are the process associated with Fischer-Tropsch diesel, and the catalytic hydrotreatment of vegetable oils to produce green diesel (GD I). The results determined that algae-based green diesel (GD III) was the least favorable process. This is because GD III has the highest impact on the water scarcity footprint and unit production cost indicators. This multi-criteria analysis with estimated weight factors can be an effective generic method for sustainability assessment of alternative manufacturing processes. (c) 2021 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd