Background: The world depends almost on fossil fuels. This leads to depletion of oil and an increase in environmental pollution. Therefore, the researchers search to find alternative fuels. Waste cooking oil (WCO) was selected as feedstock for biodiesel production to eliminates the pollution problems. The agricultural waste is very big and without cost, this leads to the use of the rice straw in preparing a catalyst for biodiesel production. Results: The reusability of the acidic catalyst confirmed that the conversion efficiency was high until after 8 cycles of the production. The highest conversion efficiency of the converting WCO extended to 90.38% with 92.5% maximum mass yield and methyl ester content 97.7% wt. at the optimized conditions. The result was indicating that B15 is the best blend for thermal efficiency and specific fuel consumption. All emission concentrations decrease with increasing the engine load, especially for B15 fuels compared to the diesel oil.Conclusion: The novelty of this paper is assessing the methyl esters from the local WCO as an alternative fuel for diesel engines using a heterogeneous catalyst based on the agricultural waste. The performance of the diesel engines and its exhaust emissions have been experimentally investigated with the produced biodiesel of WCO as a blend (B10, B15, and B20) compared to the diesel.