The first diesel engine was invented by Rudolph Diesel in 1893. Although the diesel engine was capable of running a wide variety of fuels, the first diesel engine ran solely on peanut oil. Rudolph Diesel’s vision was for farmers to have the ability to fuel their equipment with the vegetable oils that they produced themselves.

Throughout the 20th century, many countries experimented with vegetable oil as fuel for combustion engines, though unrefined vegetable oil proved to have more operational problems than petroleum based diesel. Many improvements were made in the vegetable oil refining process, until the first account of biodiesel production (also known as transesterification or alcoholysis) was reported in 1937 by G. Chavanne at the University of Belgium in Brussels. 

 

The first industrial scale biodiesel production facility was erected by an Austrian company in 1989, and plants have continued to open throughout Europe, North and South America, and Africa. In 2011, world biodiesel production reached 1 billion gallons, and has continued to increase each year. Biodiesel is available throughout the United States and numerous major engine companies have approved its use in many of their vehicles.