Alternative Fuels for Transport: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

We are glad to invite you to contribute to the Special Issue on “Alternative Fuels for Transport: The Sustainability Challenge”. Today, alternative fuels are contributing to mitigating the environmental impact of large shares of transport. In particular, the road sector utilizes a significant amount of biofuels, as a means to reduce its environmental impact. They are mostly produced from bio-derived materials, and the availability of sustainable feedstock is one of the major concerns for their use.

In the coming decades, road vehicles are expected to progressively shift towards power-train technologies other than combustion engines, such as electrical engines and fuel cells, while other transport segments are instead expected to keep relying on the liquid fuels. In particular, aviation, road freight, and maritime are usually considered as more rigid, with respect to disruptive technological changes, mainly due to the required energy density of the services they provide.

As liquid fuels will supply these sectors in the short-to-medium term, feedstocks will have to respect a rigid sustainability framework, to really contribute in the mitigation of the sectors environmental impact. The concept of sustainability encompasses aspects related to greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation potential, indirect land‐use change (ILUC), biodiversity preservation, carbon stock depletion, competition with food and feed markets, and so on. Advanced feedstock is considered a means to reduce direct and induced negative effects; they can be obtained from non‐food crops, industrial organic wastes, agricultural and forest residues are considered, as well as double cropping, marginal land productions, conversion process improvements, and so on. Alternative fuels produced for waste sources of carbon (e.g. CO₂) are another interesting possibility.

This Special Issue aims to address the challenge of producing and use alternative fuels from sustainable feedstock. How the potential supply of biomass derived feedstock could be affected by stricter sustainability criteria is the research question this Special Issue aims to answer. Other relevant aspects are related to the current policy framework, and how this could be improved. The Special Issue offers room for discussing all these topics, and it welcomes contributions from researchers, scholars, industries and any relevant stakeholders that are willing to contribute to decarbonise the transport sector.

Dr. Matteo Prussi
Dr. Marco Buffi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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