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 the petroleum and coal tar products of the present time.

hose prophetic words were spoken by Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, way back in 1912. How right he was—and he could never have imagined the geopolitical and environmental pressures that complicate the global energy situation today, forcing world leaders to look to agriculture for long-term solutions to our energy problems.

The concept of using vegetable oil as an engine fuel dates back to 1895, when Diesel developed the first engine to run on peanut oil, a technology he demonstrated at the World Exposition in Paris in 1900. Diesel died in 1913 before his vision of a vegetable-oil-powered engine was fully realized. After his demise, the petroleum industry developed rapidly and produced cheap fuels to power internal-combustion engines. Thus, clean-burning vegetable oil was more or less forgotten as a renewable source of power for nearly a century.

Scientists around the world are now building on Diesel’s legacy, racing to develop and perfect technologies to efficiently make billions of gallons of fuels annually from grains, grasses, trees, and crop seeds to complement the burgeoning ethanol-from-corn industry. But efforts to replace fossil fuels in our economy with renewable, sustainable, environmentally friendly sources of energy are not confined to fuels for vehicles.

Energy-generating applications such as manure digestion, harnessing wind and solar power, and burning waste plastics are also being explored. Nowhere has this transition to a biobased economy been considered more seriously than in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, where researchers are studying a wide range of nontraditional, alternative green-energy possibilities.