2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

That diesel engines would run on vegetable oils was shown by Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the engine bearing his name, in 1900.  However, the growth of the fossil petroleum industry soon provided an abundant, useful and affordable fuel, and the concept of vegetable oils as engine fuels became, at best, a curiosity.  However, concerns for farm and rural economic stability, energy independence, air quality and global climate led, in the last quarter of the 20^th century, to the development of biomass-based diesel fuels, known as biodiesel and renewable diesel, that are comparable or superior to petroleum diesel fuel in engine performance.  In so doing, a new industry was born, one that now provides nearly 3 billion gallons of fuel to the U.S. fuel pool annually. This talk will provide a very brief introduction to bio- and renewable diesels, and examine aspects related to the question of their sustainability, with particular attention to the critique that they reduce the availability of agricultural materials for use as food, i.e. that there is a food vs. fuel competition.