BIODIESEL AN ALTERNATIVE VEHICLES FUEL, ANALYTICAL VIEW

Introduction
Transesterification of a vegetable oil was conducted as early as 1853,
by scientists E. Duffy and J. Patrick, many years before the first diesel engine
became functional(1).
Rudolf Diesel’s prime model, a single 10ft (3 m) iron cylinder with a
flywheel at its base, ran on its own power for the first time in Augsburg,
Germany on August 10, 1893(2). Diesel later demonstrated his engine at the
World Fair in Paris, France in 1898. This engine stood as an example of
Diesel’s vision because it was powered by peanut oil—a biofuel. He believed
that the utilization of a biomass fuel was the real future of his engine. In a
1912 speech, Rudolf Diesel said, (1) “the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels
may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become, in the course of
time, as important as petroleum and the coal-tar products of the present time.”
Rudolf Diesel was not the only inventor to believe that biomass fuels
would be the mainstay of the transportation industry. Henry Ford designed his
automobiles, beginning with the 1908 Model T(1), to use ethanol. Ford was so
convinced that renewable resources were the key to the success of his
automobiles that he built a plant to make ethanol in the Midwest and formed a
partnership with Standard Oil to sell it in their distributing stations.
2
During the 1920’s, this biofuel was 25% of Standard Oil’s sales in that
area. With the growth of the petroleum industry Standard Oil cast its future
with fossil fuels. Ford continued to promote the use of ethanol through the
1930’s. The petroleum industry undercut the biofuel sales and by 1940 the
plant was closed due to the low prices of petroleum.

BIODIESEL AN ALTERNATIVE VEHICLES FUEL, ANALYTICAL VIEW