Ever since humans have burned things for light and power, they’ve been looking for cheaper, more convenient and less messy sources of fuel. Products like biodiesel for trucks or recycled cooking oil for large-scale heating systems are just the latest in a long line of vegetable-derived fuels that have kept us warm, on the move and illuminated without relying on petroleum.
Ancient Times: Vegetable Oil Lamps
You can even say that vegetable oil was the first liquid fuel. Long before the invention of the internal combustion engine in the mid 1860s, ancient civilizations were using olive, castor and grapeseed oil as fuel for simple lamps. The liquid would soak a cloth wick and provide light and a bit of heat for much longer than a wood- or coal-burning fire.
By the 1700s, whale oil had mostly replaced vegetable-derived oils for use in lamps thanks to its cleaner burn. But as whale populations dwindled and became more expensive to harvest, lamp oil went back to its vegetable roots, so to speak. Oil producers mixed corn alcohol with turpentine to create camphine—which was the dominant liquid fuel until the development of the oil drilling industry in the late 19th century.
The gusher of petroleum coming from the ground was cheap and plentiful, but the logistics of getting it to different markets—and the disruption in supply around the world wars—motivated innovators to develop vegetable-based equivalents.
1900s: New Diesel
In the early 1900s, pioneering engineer Rudolph Diesel tested the earliest versions of his engine to see how they ran on various kinds of vegetable oil, reasoning that the durable workhorse motors would be easier to market in far-flung locations that otherwise would have to rely on imported petroleum-derived fuel. A peanut farm in Senegal could create its own peanut oil to burn in the trucks and other work vehicles it used every day instead of waiting for irregular supplies of gasoline to be shipped or trucked in.
1970s: The Energy Crisis
As World War II raged, countries from India to Brazil experimented with vegetable-based fuels to serve as replacements for restricted supply of gasoline. The war ended and the oil market was restored, and it wasn’t until the energy crisis of the 1970s that the United States and Europe started experimenting with vegetable-based oils again to find an alternative to petroleum from the Middle East.
The primary motivation for that research was to keep access to fuel, but researchers discovered another benefit to burning vegetable-based oils. Compared to traditional gasoline and diesel, vegetable oil burns significantly cleaner—emitting far less greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Austria built the first large-scale biodiesel manufacturing center in 1987, and Europe now has more than 200 plants devoted to producing the “green diesel” used by tens of thousands of trucks and ships on that continent.
Today: Ethanol, Recycled Oil and New Green Standards
In the U.S., virtually every gasoline-powered vehicle is fueled to some extent by plant life in the form of corn-derived ethanol additives. Environmental regulations in the mid-2000s created a Renewable Fuel Standard gasoline producers are meeting by mixing ethanol with petroleum-derived gasoline.
It’s an enormous business: American farmers produced more than 15 billion gallons of ethanol in 2021. That fuel is delivered to gasoline terminals where it makes up anywhere from 10 to 85 percent of the gasoline blend you put in your tank every time you fill up. The higher the concentration of ethanol in the gasoline blend, the less greenhouse gasses that fuel blend produces when it’s burned.
The same rough concept is being applied to home heating oil in the markets where that fuel is still the dominant source of energy. More than 80 percent of all heating oil in the U.S. is used in the Northeast, where more than 30 percent of all homes and business use it as their primary fuel. As oil prices have risen in recent years—and state and local governments become more concerned with environmental impacts—more cost-effective, reliable and greener options are being developed.
For example, the state of Connecticut has started to require biodiesel derived from waste cooking oil to be blended with traditional heating oil, which reduces the environmental footprint of the blended oil when it burns. Energy recycling companies are beginning to aggregate waste cooking oil from restaurants, process it and sell it to large scale commercial, municipal and education clients to help meet some of these goals. Lifecycle Renewables has been at it for more than a decade, and partnerships like one with Vicinity Energy in Philadelphia turn more than a million gallons of waste restaurant oil into heating fuel per year. Lifecycle Renewables’ Truburn is a carbon neutral fuel—which means it removes as much carbon dioxide from the environment throughout its journey from plant to restaurant to commercial boiler as it produces when it burns.
Conventional petroleum-based oil is still the dominant fuel, but it isn’t hard to imagine a future where dwindling supply, increased cost and intense environmental pressure cause vegetable oil powered fuel to close the gap.
