Adsorptive desulfurization enables the attainment of ultra-low sulfur content in hydrocarbon fuels by removing the refractory sulfur compounds, which are difficult to remove in hydrodesulferization (HDS) processing when sulfur concentrations below 10 mg kg(-1) must be attained. In this work, diesel fuel was desulfurized by adsorption using activated carbon as an adsorbent and the adsorption was carried out in a fixed-bed column. The output sulfur content of less then 0.7 mg kg(-1) was achieved for the lowest flow rate of 1.0 cm(3)min(-1) and the highest bed depth of 28.4 cm at 50 degrees C. In all the experiments, at least one output sample contained less then 10.0 mg kg(-1) of sulfur with a longest achieved breakthrough time of 11.8 h. A mathematical model of the fixed-bed adsorber was applied to describe the kinetics and to estimate the breakthrough curves. The model equations included a differential material balance for a liquid phase and a mass transfer rate expression. The ability of the model to fit the experimental data was shown to be satisfactory.