The Sustainability Impacts of Fuel

This study explores the total sustainability impacts of North American road transportation fuels.

The intended audience is corporate fuel users and their value chain partners who seek to understand the sustainability impacts of fuel and broad sets of risks and opportunities associated with addressing them.

The paper was first published in 2012 and is updated for 2014.

The catalyst is a stated desire by North American corporate purchasers of transportation fuels and decision-makers with supply chains that use them to improve knowledge about fuel sustainability attributes and to identify ways to positively influence both energy production and consumption practices using a system and life cycle perspective.

In order to maintain focus, this paper has a limited scope: It addresses fuels for road (and not air, ocean, or rail) and specifically freight (and not passenger transport). It focuses on the characteristics of fuel supply, rather than fuel-demand issues such as efficiency, mode choice, and logistics optimization (although we will point out that these are critically important theaters of action).

Finally, it focuses on fuel that is consumed in North America. Wider elements are left for future research.

An effect is that it has a strong emphasis on heavy-duty and long-distance trucking applications, where oil comprises more than 90 percent of the fuel currently used.