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Ecological aspects, the finiteness of fossil resources and the effort to maintain the agricultural structures motivate the use of renewable materials. Since the seventies, the German Federal Agricultural Research Centre (FAL) has been dealing with the technical use of rape seed oil as alternative fuel. It was easy to demonstrate that pure rape seed oil is not suitable for long-term use in conventional diesel engines, because of the severe engine troubles that occurred. Nevertheless, the use of rape seed oil is possible if either the engine concept or the fuel is changed. Via a different combustion concept or the transesterification of the rape seed oil - mostly to rape seed oil methylester (RME) - rape seed oil can successfully be used as fuel. RME resembles diesel fuel (DF) in its physical properties. Since 1982, an agricultural tractor with unmodified engine has been running in a long term experiment at the FAL. No problems caused by this fuel have occurred.

Vegetable oils have the potential to be used as fuels for diesel engines. But in direct injection engines as they are used for agricultural tractors and trucks some difficulties with vegetable oils - even with fully refined oils -are noticed, so that long time operation is impossible. Enginetests were made to evaluate some modifications to these oils. The result is that the former problems do not occur with derivates of vegetable oils after transesterification with ethanol or methanol, if the injection is advanced.