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 The year was 1996, and I was a college student on a semester abroad in Europe studying agriculture and energy—the two cornerstones of American society. While working on a small organic farm in former East Germany, I saw something that changed my life. We were harvesting fields of yellow flowering plants and crushing their seeds to extract vegetable oil, which was taken to a large stainless steel machine owned cooperatively by local farmers.
Inside of that machine, something incredible happened: the vegetable oil that we had pressed from the yellow rapeseed was transformed into a fuel that could run in any diesel engine. The farmers called this fuel biodiesel. To the farmers, the process was simply a routine operation, but to me it represented a complete revolution in thinking. If we could simply "grow" our own fuel, then why was America so fixated on petroleum?
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Biodiesel fuel is a replacement for standard diesel fuel. This alternative fuel is used only in diesel engines and as a substitute for standard gasoline or standard combustion engines. Biodiesel is a product of the transesterification of vegetable or nut oils into a fuel to be used in automobiles and even home heating.
So what is transesterification? Simply stated, it is the process of neutralizing the free fatty acids and removing the glycerin of the oil used as a base for the fuel to create an alcohol ester. This process is important for two reasons:
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