- Coleman stoves are designed for camping. The first Coleman stove appeared in 1923. Today Coleman makes a variety of camping and backpacking stoves. These stoves are portable and are used for cooking food outdoors and for heating. Coleman stoves offer a variety of fuel sources, sources that have changed over the decades. As the popularity of camping continues to grow, older Coleman stoves are still available for sale as used. There are a few main fuel sources for these stoves.
- According to the Coleman website, in the 1940s the company began manufacturing one-burner stoves that ran on alcohol or kerosene. Alcohol is a liquid fuel. There are two types of alcohol used for fuel, methyl alcohol and ethyl alcohol. Methyl alcohol comes from wood products or oil. Ethyl alcohol is made from a fermentation process. Kerosene is also a liquid fuel. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a division of the United States Department of Energy, kerosene is a “light petroleum distillate that is used in space heaters, cook stoves, and water heaters and is suitable for use as a light source when burned in wick-fed lamps.”
- The Coleman company began using butane as a fuel source in the 1950s for its single-burner butane stove "although it was a picnic stove, bigger than a dictionary, heavy because it also held two butane canisters, and it was pink,” states the Coleman website. Butane is a gaseous fuel, but it is stored as a liquid. It comes from the refining of oil.
- The first Coleman stove to use propane was manufactured in 1969. The canisters to hold the propane were very heavy so propane was not a good fuel source for backpacking stoves like butane and alcohol were. Propane is similar to butane. It is a gaseous fuel and comes from refining oil. Propane is also known as LPG or liquefied petroleum gas. According to the EIA, propane is a hydrocarbon, a “colorless paraffinic gas.”
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