A History of Biodiesel

In 1900, visitors to the World's Fair in Paris saw for the first time what was going to be one of the most important inventions for the coming 20^th century: the diesel engine. Its inventor was Rudolph Diesel, who had been struggling for years to create an engine which would surpass the steam engine in efficiency, and had succeeded with his building of the first practical diesel engine in 1897, which he continued to refine before the coming of the World's Fair.

To fuel his creation, Rudolph Diesel did not use what we consider today to be diesel fuel. His diesel engine ran on peanut oil. It was Diesel's belief that vegetable based fuels would be the future of fuel: cheap and easy to access, allowing farmers and the common man a chance to compete with big business in the ability to generate power. In fact, in 1912, one year before his death, Diesel said "The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time."

Diesel's first engine was very large and could be moved only with difficulty, so its use was somewhat limited. Soon enough, however, Diesel's engine was being used in factories, aboard ships and submarines. The primary fuels to power these diesel engines were vegetable fuels.

It was not until the 1920's that manufacturers of diesel engines modified their engines to run on petroleum based fuels. Petroleum based fuels were much cheaper than vegetable based biomass fuels which Diesel had originally designed his engine for and which he saw as so important for the future. It was not long before the petroleum based diesel fuel, which we still call diesel to this day, had completely wiped out vegetable based fuels.

Fifty years passed before biofuels began to make a comeback. In 1977 a Brazilian scientist by the name of Expedito Parente created the first true biodiesel fuel, using the process of transesterification and ethanol. Parente was the first to receive a patent for biodiesel fuels, and it is following his process by which all biodiesel fuels are created today.

The next research into biodiesel fuels began in South Africa in 1979. Their development of biodiesel fuel was based on transesterified sunflower oil. It was several years before their findings were released to the world, and it was not until 1989 that the first industrial-scale plant for the creation of biodiesel fuel was created by Austrian company Gaskoks, who had purchased the technology from the South African engineers who had refined the process.

Today, with fears of global warming rising and the worry that our finite supply of petroleum will eventually run out biodiesel is making a comeback. Biodiesel fuel, which throughout the 1990's was seen primarily in European fuel stations, is beginning to be seen throughout the United States. In 2005 the state of Minnesota passed a law which made it mandatory that all diesel fuels sold in the state must contain at least 2% biodiesel. Over 100 years after Rudolph Diesel first created his engine, the world is coming back in line with his dream of vegetable based fuels