Diesel Fuel
Liquid fuels for use in internal-combustion engines are extracted and refined from crude oil, with diesel fuels being part of the middle distillate or kerosene fraction. Kerosene was initially derived from coal pyrolysis. The initial main use of this type of distillate was for the kerosene lamp, which had replaced lamps based on whale oil.
In 1859 at Titusville, Pennsylvania, Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well, and by the late 1880s most kerosene was made from crude oil. The search for crude accelerated in 1892, when Charles Duryea built the first U.S. automobile powered by a gasoline-fueled internal-combustion engine. Rudolph Diesel patented a compression ignition engine running on middle distillate at about the same time. While this engine was more fuel-efficient, it proved too complex to manufacture, not gaining in popularity until the middle of the twentieth century.
Production of Diesel Fuel
Within this encyclopedia is an article covering crude oil refining in greater detail. However, as a brief introduction, Figure 1 gives a typical example of the products extracted and refined from a barrel of crude oil. Diesel fuel averages a little more than 18 percent of the total, or approximately 9.2 gallons from each 45-gallon barrel of crude oil.
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