Sustainability criteria for renewable fuels have gained increasing attention internationally with legal requirements being under development or already established in certain countries.

Sustainability criteria include

1) greenhouse gas emission reductions on Well-to-Wheel basis,
2) land use,
3) water intensity.

This paper discusses and presents analyses for alternative transportation fuels and their use in different propulsion systems (internal combustion engine, fuel cell, plug-in hybrid) based on these criteria.

Results show that

1) greenhouse gas reductions attributable to biofuels, hydrogen and electricity have large bandwidths from 100% reduction to even significant increases in GHG emissions compared to conventional fuels; detailed results based on leading international Well-to-Wheel analyses performed by the authors are presented;

2) hydrogen and renewable electricity perform significantly superior to any of the biofuel production pathways with respect to land-use; in addition, biofuels production strongly competes with food production whereas renewable electricity and hydrogen production can use vast land areas not suitable for food production; results for specific land use requirements and for total fuel production potentials for the European Union are presented; and

3) biofuels' water requirements provide a broad bandwidth with strong sensitivities regarding local climatic conditions; results comparing biofuels with hydrogen are presented.

Full Life-Cycle-Analyses based on all sustainability criteria are required for assessing the sustainability of alternative transportation fuels. The detailed results presented show that the hopes presently put on biofuels are exaggerated and pose serious environmental and social risks. Electricity based transportation fuels in contrast can achieve full sustainability goals quantitatively and qualitatively.