Gallons In An Oil Barrel

Sue T asks: Why exercise nosotros measure out oil in barrels instead of gallons or liters? How much oil is in a barrel?

oil-pump More than simply gasoline for our cars, crude oil is transformed into an infinite diversity of products we use every day – from personal products like shampoo and lotion, to food preservatives and fertilizers, to the plastic bags and packaging that are ubiquitous today.

A Butt of Oil

One barrel contains 42 gallons of crude oil from which, in the U.S., typically 19 gallons of gasoline are produced. In California, "additional other petroleum products such as alkylates" are added to the crude to create a "processing gain," such that:

The full volume of products fabricated from crude oil based origins is 48.43 gallons on average – 6.43 gallons greater than the original 42 gallons of crude.

Co-ordinate to the California Energy Commission, each butt of crude oil yields products as follows:

Finished Motor Gasoline (51.4% – a fleck more than the national average)
Distillate Fuel Oil (15.3%)
Jet Fuel (12.3%)
Still Gas (5.four%)
Marketable Coke (v.0%)
Residual Fuel Oil (3.3%)
Liquid Refinery Gas (2.eight%)
Asphalt and Road Oil (one.7%)
Other Refined Products (1.5%)
Lubricants (0.9%)

Why Oil is Measured in Barrels

The market for crude oil really took off after Abraham Gesner began distilling kerosene in 1846. This lamp oil became very pop and every bit demand increased, and so did the demand for the crude oil it was derived from. The first successful drilled oil well (previously, it was all gleaned from "natural seepage") was in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859.

Wooden Barrels

In the mid-1800s, all liquids that needed a tight container of whatsoever size were stored in wooden barrels. Skilled coopers (barrel makers) had been producing watertight 42-gallon wooden barrels since Richard III prepare the size of a tierce of wine at 42 gallons in 1483-1484. However, to grab the oil booming from the new wells in Titusville, early on producers were using any watertight container they could get their hands on, including "wooden tierces, whiskey barrels, casks and barrels of all sizes."

Even so, the size of the container speedily became standardized around the 42-gallon barrel, due to practical considerations:

A 42-gallon tierce weighed more than than 300 pounds – about every bit much as a human could reasonably wrestle. Twenty would fit on a typical barge or railroad flatcar. Bigger casks were unmanageable and small were less profitable.

By 1860, in Pennsylvania the 42-gallon barrel had become standard. Because Pennsylvania was at the forefront of the early on oil blast, its practices were soon adopted beyond the state.

In 1872, 42 gallons became the standard for the Petroleum Producers Association and in 1882, the U.S.M.S. and the U.South. Bureau of Mines adopted the standard as well.

Oil Tankers

Bulk oil aircraft – placing the oil in the cargo holds of ships – had been used since the 1870s, as had "cylindrical railroad tank cars." By 1883, oil tankers were being built with bulkheads to cease the gratis-flowing oil in the holds from sloshing and potentially causing the ships to capsize.

In the 1950s, in response to the endmost of the Suez Canal, larger tankers that could more efficiently transport oil around the Cape of Good Hope were needed, and then the supertanker was born, and by 1958, ships that held about 700,000 barrels were being used to ship rough oil.

As of 2011, the largest supertankers, the TI Europe and the TI Oceania, were able to behave over iii,000,000 barrels of oil in a single voyage.

Oil Pipelines

Pipelines were being used to transport crude oil from the beginning of the oil boom in the 1860s, but not until the early 1900s, when demand for petroleum greatly increased, were pipelines congenital across the land:

During the 1920s, driven past the growth of the automobile industry, full U.Due south. pipeline mileage grew to over 115,000 miles.

Early on pipelines brought rough oil from "the prolific fields in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas to the refineries in the Eastward," and with the increased migration of Americans across the West, the pipelines moved in that direction equally well.

After oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in 1968, an 800-mile pipeline, from Valdez to Prince William Sound, known as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, was constructed and completed in 1977. At its superlative in the 1980s, it was conveying over ii,000,000 barrels each twenty-four hour period. By 2012, that was reduced to 579,000.

Today'south proposed Keystone XL Pipeline is set to transport crude oil from Hardisty, Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska, where:

It would connect with existing pipelines to refineries on the Gulf Declension. The U.Due south. segment would exist 875 miles long, running through Montana, Due south Dakota and Nebraska. The 36-inch diameter line could comport upwardly to 830,000 barrels of oil per solar day.

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Bonus Oil Facts

The U.Due south. State Department estimates that over 42,000 temporary jobs, and about 50 permanent jobs, would be created in the structure of the Keystone XL pipeline. According to FactCheck.org, "oil from Canadian bitumen deposits – which the Keystone would deport from Alberta to the U.S. for refining – results in 14 percentage to xx pct more greenhouse gas emissions than oil typically consumed in the U.S. at present."
According to the Environmental Protection Bureau, 29% of all marsh gas, the 2nd well-nigh prevalent human-caused greenhouse gas that is contributing to global warming, is produced by our employ of natural gas and petroleum.
"Petroleum-based constructed fertilizers . . . tin consequence in an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorous in the basis . . . [and] runoff of chemicals . . . can cause "dead zones" in larger bodies of water." The runoff of nitrogen from lawns and farms eventually travels through the watersheds and ends up in places similar the Gulf of United mexican states where the nitrogen encourages the growth of algae that absorbs the oxygen in the water, causing massive die-offs in the ocean, including of valuable fish and shellfish species.
According to a 2006 study, "globally, harmful algal blooms are considerably more widespread and frequent . . . a situation that is expected to further deteriorate by 2020 due to increased application of agricultural fertilizers."
Nitrogen fertilizers cause nitrates to accumulate in drinking water, and co-ordinate to a 2001 report, it is "statistically associated with an increased take a chance of float cancer . . . and women drinking water with average nitrate levels greater than 2.46 ppm were 2.83 times more probable to develop float cancer than women exposed to 0.36 ppm of nitrates in water."
Co-ordinate to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to form their fragile shells and skeletons, many ocean organisms require calcium carbonate minerals; yet, as increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from man-made emissions is "captivated by seawater, chemic reactions occur that reduce seawater pH . . . and calcium carbonate minerals [in a process called] ocean acidification." Without sufficient amounts of these skeletal building blocks, "near total failures of developing oysters" are being experienced forth the Due west Declension and "ocean acidification [may] severely impact . . . coral reefs [that] may erode faster than they tin can be rebuilt."

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