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12 Renewable Energy

The First Biofuels: Ethanol and Biodiesel One of the oldest forms of liquid biomass energy is ethanol. Ethanol is a renewable biofuel made of plant material. Humans have consumed ethanol in some form for thousands of years: it is the main component of alcoholic beverages. In 1826, an American inventor named Samuel Morey designed an engine that could run on a mixture of ethanol and turpentine. The German inventor Nikolaus Otto built on Morey’s designs, creating a more complicated ethanol-powered engine in 1876, and in 1896, Henry Ford developed a car called the Quadricycle that ran on ethanol. Twelve years later, Ford’s Model T could run on ethanol, gasoline, or a combination of the two. Around the same time Otto and Ford were pioneering the use of ethanol, a German engineer named Rudolf Diesel was hard at work creating another type of engine that could run on many types of fuels. This would come to be known as

Henry Ford and his Quadricycle, photographed in 1896.