10th Sep '25

Plant Oils

Some fruits, seeds and nuts are rich in useful that can be extracted. Vegetable oils are important and as they provide a lot of energy. When eaten they also provide us with .

To extracted the oil the plant material is either:

crushed and the oil removed by ; or
heated to the oil.

The and other are removed to give a refined, pure product.

Rudoph Diesel designed his engine to run on vegetable, specifically peanut oil. Vegetable oils are a fuel since they will not run out if we keep growing plants. A better fuel is which is made from vegetable oils. It has similar performance to the crude oil fraction we know as diesel. This common diesel is becoming known as petrodiesel to distinguish it from the other fuels used in a diesel engine.

However biodiesel is expensive to make than diesel from crude oil. This is because petrodiesel is produced when refining all the other fractions of crude oil, while biodiesel requires the:

extraction of oil from the plant material; and

processing of the oil.

Each process requiring effort, time and therefore cost. In addition, there are not enough vegetable crops able to be grown to replace our consumption of crude oil fuels. In some parts of the world, starvation has already occurred because fuel crops have been grown in place of food crops.

Biodiesel is carbon since the amount of carbon dioxide released during is the same as the plant took in to perform photosynthesis while growing. Biodiesels also contain sulfur than the fossil fuel equivalent, so contribute less to (See C1a).

Unlike many other alternative fuels, vegetable oil and biodiesel can be used in diesel cars without having to make any modifications to the . This means that it can be used in combination with petrodiesel to reduce the consumption fossil fuel reserves (Much like ethanol and petrol).

The greatest advantage of vegetable oils and biodiesel as a fuel, is that oil from restaurants etc can be used after again being purified.