"In the Arab world, specifically in Oman, we have a lot of waste generated from dates because we're huge consumers of dates. And at the time, the date seeds were used for coffee, as coffee beans. And we thought, can we actually utilize the oil content in the seeds to convert that into biodiesel, because it has about 9-15% of oil in the seeds. And that's what sparked the idea in the very beginning," says Lamya Adnan Al-Haj, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at Sultan Qaboos University.