Biodiesel has been around for quite some time, but it was not considered a viable fuel until recently. The transesterification of triglycerides was discovered by E. Duffy and J. Patrick as early as 1853; in fact, this hap­pened many years before the first functional diesel engine was invented. It was not until 1893 that Rudolf Diesel invented the first diesel engine and designed it to run on peanut oil. Later in the 1920s, the diesel engine was redesigned to run on petrodiesel, a fossil fuel derived from petro­leum crude [43]. Petrodiesel had been much cheaper to produce compared to any biofuel, thus there had not been many active developments in the biodiesel infrastructure.

It was not until 1977 that the first industrial biodiesel process using etha­nol was patented. Later, in 1979, South Africa started research on the trans­esterification of sunflower oil. After four years, South African Agricultural Engineers published a process for fuel-quality, engine-tested biodiesel. An Australian company called Gaskoks used this process to build the first biodiesel pilot plant in 1987 and later built an industrial-scale plant in 1989. The industrial-scale plant was capable of processing 30,000 tons of rapeseed per year [43]. As a matter of fact, rapeseed oil has also become the primary feedstock for biodiesel in Europe (estimates for 2006: more than 4 million tons of rapeseed oil went into biodiesel) [44]. During the 1990s, many European countries such as Germany and Sweden started building their own biodie­sel plants. By 1998 approximately 21 countries had some sort of commercial biodiesel production.

In September of 2005, the state of Minnesota became the first U. S. state to mandate that all diesel fuel sold in the state contain a certain part biodiesel, requiring a content of at least 2% biodiesel (B2 and up). This established that biodiesel blend fuel is no longer a choice, but a standard and mandate. On April 23, 2009, the European Union (E. U.) adopted the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) which included a 10% target for the use of renewable energy in road transport fuels by 2020. It also established the environmental sus­tainability criteria that biofuels consumed in the European Union have to comply with, covering a minimum rate of direct GHG emission savings as well as restrictions on the types of land that may be converted to production of biofuel feedstock crops [45, 46].