By 1850 a consumer had a choice of:

    * Camphene or “burning fluid” — 50 cents/gallon (combinations of alcohol, turpentine and camphor oil – bright, sweet smelling)
    * whale oil — $1.30 to $2.50/gallon
    * lard oil — 90 cents (low quality, smelly)
    * coal oil — 50 cents (sooty, smelly, low quality) (the original “kerosene”)
    * kerosene from petroleum — 60 cents (introduced in early 1860s)

The amount of camphene on the market was far above 90 million and probably close to 200 million gallons per year. That’s about the same level as kerosene in 1870. Whale oil peaked at 18 million gallons in 1845, according to Starbuck’s whaling history of 1878. [NEITHER AHAB’S FIRST MATE NOR THE COFFEE CHAIN, BTW, BUT A GUY NAMED ALEXANDER STARBUCK.] By all accounts, camphene was by far the leading lamp fuel.
In 1862, a tax of $2.00 a gallon was imposed on beverage alcohol and camphene was forced off the market. Since the Pennsylvania oil fields were in the process of opening, the whales really had nothing to do with the emergence of the kerosene industry.

Thus, kerosene came into an already well established liquid fuel system with full scale production, distribution and end-use technology already well in place. In other words, kerosene replaced an array of lamp fuels of various qualities and prices; it did not suddenly emerge to light up a world quickly going dark as the supply of whales ran out.