Praise the Lard and celebrate the “Good Juice” today! It’s International Biodiesel Day – celebrate VEGPOWER!

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. Rudolf Diesel’s prime model, a single 10 ft (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. In remembrance of this event, August 10 has been declared International Biodiesel Day. Diesel later demonstrated his engine and received the “Grand Prix” (highest prize) at the World Fair in Paris, France in 1900. This engine stood as an example of Diesel’s vision because it was powered by peanut oil—a biofuel, though not strictly biodiesel, since it was not transesterified. He believed that the utilization of a biomass fuel was the real future of his engine. In a 1912 speech, Rudolf Diesel said “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.”
Wikipedia: Biodiesel – Historical background

This weekend I plan on brewing my first big batch of biodiesel at home. I have all the ingredients – the only glitch is that my scale gave up the ghost :( but I’ll borrow one from a fellow biodieseler …

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 8:26 am and is filed under Biodiesel, Celebrate!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.