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Fossil fuels as the primary energy source create career opportunities, provide industries with vital raw material and energy resources, have harmful emissions to the environment and are also related to finite natural resources. They rely on them as the main source of energy supply is unsustainable. Sustainability assessment tools may be useful in developing a more sustainable scenario. However, the resiliency of nature is not taken into account in this linear assessment. The detrimental effect of these fuels on the environment during their life cycle would suggest transitioning from cradle-to-grave to the cradle-to-cradle lifecycle viewpoint. This study implements the Circular Economic (CE) in fossil fuel development to minimize the unsustainable effects and ensure the environment's resiliency. In this context, three different fossil fuels are assessed based on the CE model's proposed lifecycle phases to find out the most sustainable fossil fuel option. A case study is carried out in an industrial location with high-level decision-makers. CE criteria are evaluated based on the E-SWARA method to ensure the assessment's reliability at this critical step. Next, a novel MCDM method, MARCOS, is applied to this study. Based on the results, gas is the most sustainable energy generation plant in the intended region.

Infrastructure projects, which include a wide range of construction and energy projects, play an important role amid other industrial projects. In this regard, petroleum refinery industry projects are one of the leading manufacturing industries in the world and have the most notable position in the energy industry projects. Developing petroleum refinery industry projects are one of the principal contributors to economic and social development. In spite of the necessity of country development, this development has to be sustained at least in economic, social, and environmental matters (pillars of sustainable development) particularly after the Brundtland Commission Report in 1987. In this paper, it is proposed to simplify the evaluation process of life cycle sustainability versus life cycle stages. Thus, an indicator-based approach is used in order to evaluate the sustainability along different stages of petroleum refinery industry projects. Also, a multi-level hierarchy of criteria decision making is defined by using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), combined with a fuzzy set theory to enhance the reliability of the results. The outputs of this paper will be helpful for decision makers in many ways such as the most important stage with regard to sustainable development matters; or the most important pillars (economic, social, and environmental) of sustainability in each life cycle stage. Also, other valuable outputs based on the results are consequently discussed.

For developing countries, energy infrastructure projects are not only important from a political and strategic point of view, but they are also of major significance in terms of sustainability. Energy infrastructure projects have major impacts on all three pillars of sustainability, that is, social, economic, and environmental. Refinery projects can have an even bigger impact on all three pillars, in terms of magnitude and severity of the consequences. Therefore, it is important to introduce methods and solutions to improve the level of sustainability at which petroleum refinery projects are designed, constructed, and operated. Petroleum refinery projects are multidisciplinary, multiattribute, and multistakeholder projects and decisions in this regard are always difficult to make and unclear about sustainability in the life-cycle of the project. To deal with these complexities, a dynamic sustainability assessment framework has been proposed in this study. In this framework, different petroleum refinery project's properties such as location, size, functions, stakeholders, products, environmental resiliency, and so on are considered in various life-cycle phases and are used to come up with a customized framework. Accordingly, a hierarchy of the latest and the most suitable Multiple Criteria Decision Making methodologies are utilized for different decision-making environments to realize the required dynamicity in these projects. The methods used here are Grey Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment, Fuzzy Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution, and Combinative Distance-Based Assessment, each of which are proposed for different decisionmaking levels. The proposed methodology is applied to a real petroleum refinery project as a case study. Based on the case study results, the economical pillar gets nearly 50% of the importance based on the project's specific situation. Also, health, atmosphere, and economic performance are the most important indicators among social, environmental, and economic pillars, respectively. At the lowest level, quantitative factors are also ranked and weighted. For instance, the frequency of labors' illness is the highest health factors in the social pillar of sustainability.

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