History of Biofuels

The concept of biofuels dates back to Rudolf Diesel who envisioned vegetable oil as a fuel source for his newly invented engine. The process the Initiative uses to produce biodiesel was discovered in 1937 by G. Chavanne of the University of Brussels in Belgium who was granted a patent for a paper entitled "Procedure for the transformation of vegetable oils for their uses as fuels", a process now called transesterification.