According to Joseph Meehan :
Are you sure that was a gasoline engine they were talking about. Diesel
and kerosene are very close. Gasoline is different.

gasoline, kerosene and diesel are _almost_ exactly the same thing.

Each is a mixture of varying weight hydrocarbons, more or less directly
off a fractionating tower. The only difference is that the average molecular
weight of the hydrocarbons is lowest in gasoline, higher in kerosene, and
highest in diesel.

[In a standard fractionating tower, there's usually "taps" off
for LPG, butane, light and heavy gasoline, light and heavy kerosene,
light and heavy diesel, and then various kinds of asphalt. You make
various grades of gasoline primarily by varying the light/heavy ratio.
Similarly summer versus winter weight diesel etc]

Conceptually, there's no reason a gasoline engine couldn't run off
diesel. In practise, gasoline engines are pretty finely tuned, and
something thicker than gasoline will throw it off, perhaps too far
off to operate properly.
--
Chris Lewis, Una confibula non set est
It's not just anyone who gets a Starship Cruiser class named after them.