Fair enough , yeah, I stuffed up there should have said energy content for volume. They all have much different densities at room temperature.

When it comes to carrying the stuff the different densities mean that you need to carry more gas by weight, including the canisters to get the equivalent of gasoline. And way more alcohol than either gas or other liquid fuels. So if I have my one litre bottle of stove fuel, I can get a lot more energy out of gasoline than I could out of alcohol.

Then there's the cost of gas... I used to go out for 9 days at a time for work. I could do that with 1.5 Litres of white spirit (pure gasoline) which I could buy for $2 a litre in bulk. Alcohol was about 2.5L and cost me about the same. 3 gas canisters were around $5 each.

I guess if I was just travelling for a few days I'd use gas for the convenience, but I use white spirit/gasoline/coleman fuel for anything else.

The other downside was the gases poor performance when it's cold, especially if you get the cheap cartridges that have lots of propane. Butane is ok though. Though I did have a friend who had one of the liquid gas stoves with the horizontal cylinders, that worked well, but the cartridges cost a fortune and the weight was only slightly less than a liquid fuel stove.

And the CO issue is a very real one. I was a ranger on a long walking track with huts. Often when the huts filled with people cooking and breathing and the fire was lit the CO would build up and the oxygen level drop so much I couldn't get my jet lighter to go. Some of the huts the ventilation screens hadn't been cleaned for years. Some didn't have any fixed ventilation. So that got flagged as a serious OH&S issue. People didn't like having the window open because of the cold. I always wondered if one day I'd rock up to a hut and find it full of dead people after somebody left a stove on for heating. I think stopping that was all the people going in and out to the toilet, the door was the biggest source of ventilation.