Life cycle sustainability assessment of fuels

This paper gives an overview of the potential on multi-criteria assessment of fuels. In order to apply the multi-criteria approach to fuels, it was necessary to use the multi-criteria procedure based on the sustainability index rating composed of linear aggregative functions of all indicators with weighting function. The examples under consideration are conventional gasoline (CG), conventional diesel oil (CD), compressed natural gas (CNG), mixture of 85% methanol (derived from natural gas) and 15% gasoline by volume (M85), mixture of 85% ethanol (derived from corn) and 15% gasoline by volume (E85), and pure cassava-based ethanol (E100). These options are evaluated with the multi-criteria method comprising the following indicators: life cycle costs (LCC), global warming potential (GWP), net energy yield (NE), non-renewable resource depletion potential (NRDP) indicator. The evaluation of options under consideration was performed under constraint expressing non-numeric relation among the indicators. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.