TABLE OF CONTENTS Solid biofuels such as wood (Chap. 9) or dried dung have been used since man learned to control fire.
On the other hand, liquid biofuels for industrial applications was used since the early days of the car industry. Nikolaus August Otto, the inventor of the combustion engine, conceived his invention to run on ethanol while Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, conceived it to run on peanut oil. Henry Ford originally had designed the Ford Model T, a car produced between 1903 and 1926, to run completely on ethanol. Ford s desires to mass produce electric cars did not come to fruition. However, when crude oil began being cheaply extracted from deeper in the soil (thanks to oil reserves discovered in Pennsylvania and Texas), cars began using fuels from oil.
Nevertheless, before World War II, biofuels were seen as providing an alternative to imported oil in countries such as Germany, which sold a blend of gasoline with alcohol fermented from potatoes under the name Reichskraftsprit. In Britain, grain alcohol was blended with petrol by the Distillers Company Ltd. under the name Discol and marketed through Esso s affiliate Cleveland.
After the war, cheap Middle Eastern oil lessened interest in biofuels. Then, with the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, there was an increase in interests from governments and academics in biofuels. However, interest decreased with the counter-shock of 1986 that made oil prices cheaper again. But since about 2000 with rising oil prices, concerns over...
