- Oil barrel, (abbreviation bbl): a legacy volume measure of 42 US gallons (34.9723 imp gal; 158.9873 L). It can also mean 35 imperial gallons (42.0332 US gal; 159.1132 L). Commonly a barrel is regarded as 159 L volume.
See caveat below regarding considerations for conversion to metric units.
The standard oil barrel of 42 US gallons is used in the United States as a measure of crude oil and other petroleum products. Elsewhere, oil is commonly measured in cubic metres (m3) or in tonnes (t), with (metric) tonnes more often being used by European oil companies. International companies listed on American stock exchanges tend to express their oil-production volumes in barrels for global reporting purposes, and those listed on European exchanges tend to express their production in tonnes. There can be 6 to 8 barrels of oil in a ton, depending on density. For example: 256 US gallons of heavy distillate per ton, 272 gallons of crude oil per ton, and 333 gallons of gasoline per ton.
Read more about this topic: Barrel (unit)
Famous quotes containing the words oil and/or barrel:
“No skilled hands
caress a stranger’s flesh with lucid oil before
a word is spoken
no feasting
before a tale is told, before
the stranger tells his name.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)