Greetings, All, Too hard to answer, as I very much enjoy Coleman Fuel (trust it, grew up with it), Kerosene (THE fuel of choice for most brassie discus stoves), and Methylated Spirits (can't live without a few Trangia stoves, and this is the only "green" fuel amongst the bunch!). But, if you limit your fuel choice to just one fuel, it would have to be kerosene....no, wait... Coleman Fuel...... er.... just a minute..... Meths..... NO Wait..... when do you have to know??!! Take care, and God Bless! Every Good Wish, Doc
My favorite fuel (and what I voted for) is kerosene. Best mix of pure BTUs, reliability, use in any temperature or weather condition, and safety. And in an emergency, my truck will run on it. My least-used fuel due to lack of availability and my most commonly used stove doesn't like burning it much. What I actually USE the most..................is pump/car gasoline. A Coleman suitcase lives in the sunroom, for use out on the patio all summer. Much nicer to cook outside when it's warm. Always have a can of stabilized car gas handy for other equipment so always have fuel for it. Stove gets drained and stored on white gas because car gas is spectacularly unsuited to storage. Hiking, my most-used fuel is butane. Hard to deny the ease and speed with which it can be deployed. Can stop hiking and have water heating in less than a minute.
Domestic and car camping - kero, (not at all influenced by the fact that I have a 1300 litre tank of the stuff ) Hiking - white gas/Coleman fuel/panel wipe. Overseas - alcohol in a Trangia (easy to source and no airline hassle).
Meths ticks all the boxes for me; it's green, cleaner to handle and UK meths smells great when alight! Kero is next, then butane/propane. White gas trails in last.
Kerosene is my choice for stove and lantern. I converted a few years ago, mostly because of this site! I was a Coleman person before and swore by white gas, now I just swear at it. I love the heat from kerosene, you can really feel the difference. I only use alcohol to pre-heat for the kerosene. That being said, when I'm using my 123R or 8R I have to use white gas, but the 111C runs kerosene exclusively.
It depends. On the boat, cruising solo: Kero/para. It's the same fuel as the running lights and riding light, so I only have to carry large stocks of the one fuel, and it's safer than white gas and hotter than alk. And I love my brassies. On the boat with my now-ex: Alk/meths. Safe, acceptibly hot, and less smell to make herself uncomfortable. Not so much of a priority now, though... On its own merits a serious contender for its "green" cred, too. (And I love my brassies.) Hiking and camping: White gas/naptha. Hot, easy operation, and no separate primer needed. Unlike on the boat, if anything goes *seriously* amiss I've got plenty of room to get clear, so safety isn't a problem. I can take my Svea 123, Op111, or Whisperlite and be perfectly content. Since using the stoves on the boat (and I'm now sailing solo) is 90% of my stove use these days, kero gets my vote, but ask me in a year and the answer might be different. It's not like I'll ever get rid of my meths or naptha stoves because I don't like their fuel. Alex
I am mixed on this. Being USA I grew up with Coleman. In 1982 I spent the summer camping my way to Alaska and back. I converted my Coleman suitcase to propane (had a 5lb refillable tank) for convenience when in the car. When flying into the bush and/or backpacking I had the original Peak 1. I now travel pretty much every week so my go to is the old French surplus aluminum stove that I use alcohol gel, the kind you wash your hands with. Why.... because you can check that in with your luggage and even a small amount in carry-on. In every car I have a one burner Coleman propane. No worries about spillage. Not romantic but practical. And by they way, I grew up in the Texas Panhandle where there isn't much water but a lot of crude oil and natural gas. It's funny if a significant amount of income comes from fossil fuel one doesn't worry much about using it for cooking. Besides, to make alcohol you have to grow a crop which is very inefficient regarding water use. You use fossil fuel to plant, harvest and control the weeds then use more fossil fuel to distill the alcohol. So whomever thinks that alcohol is green has been deluding themselves or drinking too much of said substance.
Whatever the larger environmental issues are with fossil fuels, I find it impossible to understand how they can relate to camp stove fuel, for the reasons Vacek touches upon.
Possibly, but not necessarily. Wood was the common source of heat for moonshiners. One is always warned to "Watch for the smoke!" when hiking in the mountains here. ")
Many modern distilleries use electricity to heat their stills. The electricity often comes from renewable hydroelectric, wind, solar, or geothermal sources. Ben
comes from the ground its a fossil fuel. Actually thats not fully correct is it. Plutonium is manufactured from urainium which is the fossil fuel. There is only so much to go round and with Kim wasting it making large underground caverns it will run out one day
Actually uranium is sort of a renewable energy source - when the U235 are being used in an ordinary reactor it "looses" neutrons creating plutonium (out of the non-fissile U238) which later runs a significant part of the reaction in the later part of a fuel cycle. In the spent fuel there are still an amount of fissile material left. If that fuel is reprocessed, as opposed to directly sent to a final repository facility, it can be separated into mainly three fractions: fissile plutonium, non-fissile uranium and "waste". If that Pu, and also U238, are combined into new fuel rods - you get what's called "MOX fuel" [Mixed OXide] which can then be sent back into the ordinary reactor for another cycle - ad infinitum. It's the "waste" that needs to be taken care of - the rest is a renewable energy source for lots of fuel cycles long into the future. Using the U238 in artillery shells + burning the Pu off in spectacular fireworks is a true waste of our future. In several ways... /Odd "Water boiler" in both very large and minute scale - since several decades...
I hate to rain on your parade, but according to these folks, most of the methanol produced in the USA is made from natural gas. I'm pretty sure that's also true in most other industrialized countries. As an undergrad over 40 years ago, we were told that most alcohol produced for industrial purposes (that would include fuels) is petrochemical in origin. It's possible to produce methanol, ethanol, and other alcohols from fermentation and distillation, but apparently most fuel alcohol is not produced that way. ....Arch
