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[Duke 2.0]

 Still, it shows that plant oils can be used as fuel. And heck, we can say all DF universe plants are oily.

[Aquillion]

I mentioned this in another thread, but while we're talking fuels:  Historically peat was used for furnaces (including metalworking) for a long time in many parts of the world.

[puke]

lets not forget destilling!  wikipedia says this about lamp oils:

Fuel
The main fuel in Western nations was whale oil, though extracts from fish, crude fish oil, nuts, and cheese was also used. Oozing crude petroleum was also used. The fuel was poured into the fuel reservoir via the pouring hole in the discus.

Castor oil was used by the ancient Egyptians. In Africa, carrot oil, peanut oil, mustard oil and nettle oil are used.

[chucks]

Nearly any plant materials (especially seeds, fruits, and blossoms) can be ground into a paste useful for oil or essence extraction.  The extraction processes are widely varied, but the part that varies the most is the difficulty of the extraction process and the yield from the plants.

Edit: I missed the post higher up about peat before I submitted this post.  I still want to show my support for it as a fuel.

Not sure if this is feasible, but perhaps df could also have petroleum deposits or petroleum sources as a resource.  This could vary from the different crude oil varieties all the way to oil shale layers.  Perhaps methane clouds could form around oil deposits.  If there were some way to drill for oil and collect methane gas, that would be interesting.  Not sure about medieval fantasy mechanisms for harvesting, storage, or transport of gases, but it's an idea.  Also, methane could be collected from livestock areas.

And one last tangent...  The fuel/air mixture is a huge factor in the temperature of combustion.  Many mechanisms for burning liquid fuel tend require the fuel to be aspirated prior to combustion.  Interesting trick, a lit match dropped in a glass of diesel fuel will simply go out.

Someone mentioned a thermal lance higher in the thread.  I've seen some thermal lances that used a mixture of diesel fuel and water as a fuel and shot out a flame about 2-4 feet out depending on the pressure of the fuel.  Burning with water might seem counterintuitive, but it's actually necessary to keep the nozzle temperature low enough to be able to hold the shaft of the lance further down without burning through work gloves.

[P-Luke]

Well, oil could be found the same way underground pools/aquifiers are found.
It would be awesome if you could just dig a well like you would dig a well for water, and then gather oil by walking from the well to a barrel using a bucket.

[Volfram]

On the topic of candles, there are experiments going on checking the viability of using paraffin (candle wax) as a rocket fuel.

Anybody who's ever seen the video of a bunch of guys starting their grill with liquid oxygen knows that an oxygen-rich environment effectively turns basically anything into rocket fuel.(I believe it took them less than 2 minutes to completely melt the grill.)

And yes, there's an important distinction that must be made: oxygen does not burn.  It is required for a reaction, and a high-oxygen atmosphere drastically lowers the flash point of things, but "burning" is shorthand for "rapid oxidation"(rust on iron is the result of a very slow "burning" process, and the process that produces it does also produce heat), and the oxygen is not the thing being oxidized.

[edit](video in question.  Very dwarven.)[/edit]