Energy efficiency

According to a comparative life-cycle study by the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, biodiesel requires only 0.31 units of fossil energy to make 1 unit of fuel. (Acrobat file, 672 kb)
An Overview of Biodiesel and Petroleum Diesel Life Cycles
http://www.nrel.gov/vehiclesandfuels/npbf/pdfs/24772.pdf

"By contrast, it takes 1.2 units of fossil resources to produce 1 unit of petroleum diesel," the study says.

We wonder what the true energy efficiency figures for biodiesel would be if fossil fuels were eliminated from the equation and the entire production process powered by biofuels produced on the farm, from planting the seeds to filling the tank. If it's an organic farm the fossil-fuel based chemical fertilizers are eliminated as well. And why waste energy trucking energy crops to a distant large-scale central processing unit and then waste even more energy trucking the finished fuel all the way back again, instead of processing it and using it right there where it was grown?

Grow your own

For a range of small-scale oilseed presses see Oilseed presses at our Biofuels supplies and suppliers page.

Rapeseed (Brassica napus), or canola, produces about 2,000 pounds of seed per acre, yielding about 100 gallons of vegetable oil for fuel, as well as 1,200 pounds of high-protein meal (seedcake) which can be used for livestock feed, or composted, or added to a biogas digester to produce methane for cooking and heating, or used to make ethanol.

Yields from soybeans are about 60 gallons per acre, from coconuts more than 200 gallons per acre, and from oil palms more than 500 gallons per acre. (See Vegetable oil yields.)

On the small scale, one bushel of rapeseed (canola) produces about 3 gallons of biodiesel.

The Sunflower Seed Huller and Oil Press -- by Jeff Cox (from Organic Gardening, April 1979, Rodale Press): Vegetable oils used to be one of those items you just HAD to buy. Now here's how to make your own. In 2,500 square feet, a family of four can grow each year enough sunflower seed to produce three gallons of homemade vegetable oil suitable for salads or cooking and 20 pounds of nutritious, dehulled seed -- with enough broken seeds left over to feed a winter's worth of birds. Online at the Journey to Forever Biofuels Library.

Briquette Presses for Alternate Fuel Use, by Jason Dahlman with Charlie Forst, 2001 -- Design for a simple briquette press that can also be used as an oil press for seeds. Acrobat file, 2.8Mb
http://www.echotech.org/technical/
technotes/Briquete.pdf

"The Manual Screw Press for Small-Scale Oil Extraction" by Kathryn H. Potts, Keith MacHell, 1993, Practical Action, ISBN 1853391980
Manual oil extraction from peanuts or other soft oilseeds can be a viable enterprise for small businesses. Describes small-scale processes of oil extraction for use in rural areas, as well as ways to market and distribute the oilcake. Buy at Amazon.com: The Manual Screw Press for Small-Scale Oil Extraction

"Small-scale Vegetable Oil Extraction", S W Head, A A Swetman, T W Hammonds, A Gordon, K H Southwell and R V Harris, Natural Resources Institute, 1994, ISBN 0 85954 387-0 -- Covers a basic understanding of the science and composition of oils and economic and marketing considerations, principles of oil extraction, basic oilseed processing methods, the major oil sources with specific small and intermediate technologies for each. Results from actual third world situations are used. For example, the discussion of obtaining oil from sesame seed covers a hot water flotation method used in Uganda and Sudan, the bridge press (laboratory only), the ram press in Tanzania, the ghani process in Sudan, and a small-scale expeller in the Gambia. Technical details for each are summarized in a few paragraphs, including oil yields. Includes many drawings that are helpful in understanding each process, with a 14-page appendix listing suppliers of small-scale equipment. Coconuts, groundnuts, oil palm, palm kernels, rapeseed/mustard seed, sesame, shea nuts, soya, sunflower seed, minor oilseeds (reference list). Complete book free online at CD3WD 3rd World Development online library: http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/cd3wd/
foodproc/nr18se/en/b981.htm

Oil Extraction, Food Cycle Technology Source Book No. 1, Intermediate Technology Development Group, United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), 1987. Raw materials, traditional extraction methods, improved technologies, Appropriate Technology approach for 3rd World countries, illustrated, focus on opportunities for women. Download free from the CD3WD online 3rd World library (5.8Mb pdf):
http://www.fastonline.org/CD3WD_40/JF/417/06-298.pdf

Understanding Pressure Extraction of Vegetable Oils, VITA Technical Paper #40, by VITA Volunteers James William Casten and Harry E. Snyder. Full text online at CD3WD 3rd World Development online library:
http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/vita/vegoilex/en/vegoilex.htm

Understanding Solvent Extraction of Vegetable Oils, VITA Technical Paper # 41, by VITA Volunteer Nathan Kessler. Full text online at CD3WD 3rd World Development online library:
http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/vita/vegoilse/en/vegoilse.htm

Small-Scale Oil Extraction from Groundnuts and Copra (ILO - WEP, 1983, 128 p.), full text online at CD3WD 3rd World Development online library:
http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/
cd3wd/foodproc/h2384e/en/b989.htm

"Small-scale Oilseed Processing" by Janet Bachmann, NCAT Agriculture Specialist, Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) -- Basic processes involved in small-scale oilseed processing, includes a low-tech method for raw material preparation using sunflower seeds as an example; information on methods and equipment used for oil extraction; notes on clarification, packaging, and storage. Sources for additional information and a list of suitable raw material.
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/oilseed.html

Official

Biodiesel is recognized by both the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy as an alternative fuel, and qualifies for mandated programs under the Clean Air Act Amendments and the Environmental Protection Act of 1992 (EPAct). In California, biodiesel has been approved for use in remediation of petroleum oil spills.

US Department of Energy approval: "Vehicle fleets currently required to purchase light duty alternative fueled vehicles under the Energy Policy Act of 1992 will be now allowed to purchase biodiesel fuel as an alternative, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. [Then-]Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham has approved a final rule allowing biodiesel fuel to qualify as an alternative fuel for automobile fleets under the Energy Policy Act." -- U.S. Department of Energy, April 30, 2001. "The continued use of biomass products like biodiesel in our vehicle fleets, for power generation and for other products and materials will help the environment and help diversify our energy resources," said Abraham.

USDA Clears Air with Biodiesel: Buses and other diesel-burning vehicles run cleaner if they mix biodiesel with regular diesel fuel, said the US Department of Agriculture at a biodiesel fuel seminar at a USDA research center. "The program is part of a federal effort to reduce reliance on petroleum and create new markets for US crops," said Floyd P. Horn, administrator of the Agricultural Research Service, USDA's chief scientific agency. "Crop-based diesel burns cleaner, less sooty. One of our goals is to increase the federal government's purchases of bio-based fuel and other products by 10% per year over the next 5 years. We want to encourage the private sector and local governments to do the same." (January 13, 2000)
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2000/000113.htm

Europe leads the way in biodiesel production and consumption. Germany has more than 1,900 filling stations selling biodiesel at the pump. France is the world's largest producer: all French diesel fuel contains between 2% and 5% biodiesel, and that will soon apply to the whole of Europe, and to other countries.

Meanwhile biodiesel production in the US is growing rapidly, from only half a million gallons in 2000 to 250 million gallons in 2006, with more than 80 new large-scale plants due to come online in 2008.

China, India and Brazil are rapidly becoming major producers and many other countries are following. One report forecast that by the year 2020 as much as 20% of all on-road diesel fuel used in Europe, Brazil, China and India could be biodiesel.

Unofficial

Journey to Forever has been at the forefront of the development of cheap, effective and safe small-scale production methods that produce high-quality fuel and that anyone can use.

Worldwide, many thousands of small, independent, local operations are now producing and using millions and millions of gallons of biodiesel a year, with millions of dollars in petro-diesel sales lost to ExxonMobil & Co.

Most of it goes right under the official radar. Nobody has any clear idea of quite who these people are or how much fuel they produce, mainly because the individual quantities are so small it's considered insignificant. But the grassroots biodiesel movement is growing fast and spreading like a weed, it's suitably out of control.

And it's not destroying rainforests and forcing up food prices so poor people can't afford to eat. It's industrialised "agrofuels" production that does that -- true biofuels production is small-scale, local, eco-friendly and sustainable.

"Small is beautifuel." (Prof. Pagandai Pannirselvam, Brazil.)

History of biodiesel

"An engine that Rudolf Diesel showed at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris ran on peanut oil..." said The Economist in an article on biofuels. -- Stirrings in the corn fields, May 12th 2005 (288kb pdf):
http://www.greenfuels.org/biodiesel/economist120505.pdf

George Monbiot said the same thing in The Guardian: "This, in fact, was how Rudolf Diesel expected his invention to be used. When he demonstrated his engine at the World Exhibition in 1900, he ran it on peanut oil." -- "Fuel for nought", November 23, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1357370,00.html

The US National Biodiesel Board (NBB) says Diesel "originally designed the diesel engine in the late 19th Century to run on peanut oil."
http://www.biodiesel.org/

Almost every website on biodiesel or Straight Vegetable Oil fuel says the same, along with The Washington Post and The New York Times, which said Diesel had "demonstrated a tractor that chugged along on peanut oil".

But he didn't do it, it wasn't him. (And there wasn't any tractor.)

Vegetable oil rated only a few lines in Diesel's book "The Development of the Diesel Engine", which he wrote in 1913. He says it was not him but the French Otto Company that ran one of his engines on peanut oil at the 1900 Paris World Fair, at the request of the French government.

"The engine was built for crude oil and was used without any modification on peanut oil. ... it ran so smoothly that only a few insiders were aware of it," Diesel wrote.

Diesel said the work had not been continued in France, but he'd started trials with peanut oil himself a few months previously, and provided some figures on fuel consumption and power. Similar successful experiments had also been made in St. Petersburg with castor oil, he said.

"This oil is almost as effective as the natural mineral oils, and as it can also be used for lubricating oil, the whole work can be carried out with a single kind of oil produced directly on the spot. Thus this engine becomes a really independent engine for the tropics," he wrote.

"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.

"In any case, they make it certain that motor power can still be produced from the heat of the sun, which is always available for agricultural purposes, even when all our natural stores of solid and liquid fuels are exhausted." (Diesel, Rudolf. 1913. "Die Entstehung des Dieselmotors" 1st reprint by Braun, Hans-Joachim (Ed). 1984. Moers: Steiger. Page 115.)

Very prophetic -- it's nearly a hundred years later, and a lot of people are seeing it that way now.

Modern research and development of biodiesel fuel started in South Africa (which was under an oil embargo at the time), and in Austria (which bought South Africa's research).

The idea that ordinary people could make it in their kitchens came a little later.

The man who started the do-it-yourself biodiesel movement, Dr. Thomas B. Reed, relates how he got the idea of making biodiesel from waste cooking oil ("McDiesel") in 1989, and tells you how to do it. This was the only information we had when we started making biodiesel. Now there are better ways of doing it, but it's all thanks to Tom Reed. See McDiesel Also see Tom's Biomass Energy Foundation site:
http://www.woodgas.com/

Fat of The Land -- In 1994 four women from the California Bay Area travelled 3,000 miles around the US on biodiesel in their Fat Mobile diesel van on an educational tour. They made their biodiesel as they went along, usually in the parking lots of fast-food restaurants, and filmed a groundbreaking video documentary while they were at it.
http://www.lardcar.com/lardcar1.html

Today, anyone can learn how to make their own top-quality biodiesel, safely, reliably and cheaply. Start here: Where do I start? Follow the instructions, step by step. It tells you everything you need to know.