kerosene, flammable hydrocarbon liquid commonly used as a fuel. Kerosene is typically pale yellow or colourless and has a not-unpleasant characteristic odour. It is obtained from petroleum and is used for burning in kerosene lamps and domestic heaters or furnaces, as a fuel or fuel component for jet engines, and as a solvent for greases and insecticides.
Discovered by Canadian physician Abraham Gesner in the late 1840s, kerosene was initially manufactured from coal tar and shale oils. However, following the drilling of the first oil well in Pennsylvania by E.L. Drake in 1859, petroleum quickly became the major source of kerosene. Because of its use in lamps, kerosene was the major refinery product for several decades until the advent of the electric lamp reduced its value for lighting. Production further declined as the rise of the automobile established gasoline as an important petroleum product. Nevertheless, in many parts of the world, kerosene is still a common heating and cooking fuel as well as a fuel for lamps. Standard commercial jet fuel is essentially a high-quality straight-run kerosene, and many military jet fuels are blends based on kerosene.
Chemically, kerosene is a mixture of hydrocarbons. The chemical composition depends on its source, but it usually consists of about 10 different hydrocarbons, each containing 10 to 16 carbon atoms per molecule. The main constituents are saturated straight-chain and branched-chain paraffins, as well as ring-shaped cycloparaffins (also known as naphthenes). Kerosene is less volatile than gasoline. Its flash point (the temperature at which it will generate a flammable vapour near its surface) is 38 °C (100 °F) or higher, whereas that of gasoline is as low as −40 °C (−40 °F). This property makes kerosene a relatively safe fuel to store and handle.
With a boiling point between about 150 and 300 °C (300–575 °F), kerosene is considered to be one of the so-called middle distillates of crude oil, along with diesel fuel. It can be produced as “straight-run kerosene,” separated physically from the other crude oil fractions by distillation, or it can be produced as “cracked kerosene,” by chemically decomposing, or cracking, heavier portions of the oil at elevated temperatures.