Comment by timoth3y 2 days ago
Planet Money had a wonderful series of episodes where they did exactly this a few years ago.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...
They traced the path of their barrel from purchase, to production, to refining, to the sale of the various hydrocarbon products.
It's a great listen.
Is there a market for barrels? - I would assume most oil is stored in tanks, transported via pipeline to harbor, loaded onto tanker and oil trucks with never seeing a barrel and the barrel mostly serving as a unit for calculation.
Im in Texas, lots of oil, and have seen market for such barrels when shopping for shipping containers and IBC totes in the past. Usually I find sellers of these things near distribution hubs.
The barrels never had been used for crude oil when I’ve inquired. Sometimes a refined oil product likely used as a raw material for a manufacturing process, but never crude. I think it’s never transported in such small quantities to make sense of using actual barrels. It’s more so a unit of measure, probably with some valid historical context.
My understanding is it’s most likely transported from a well via a pipeline and may need a short trip in a truck or train (tanker style) to get to the pipeline from the well. The well itself usually has a collection reservoir to allow for 24/7 extraction.
I don’t know exactly I’ve just been vaguely around oil industry and engineers my whole life due to where I live.
As conductr says, barrels are still commonly used for refined oil products. I worked at a gas station as a teenager, and we sold barrels of oil to farmers. They worked on a deposit system, we'd buy back the barrels. Or more commonly the farmer brought back the empty when buying a new barrel so didn't get charged the deposit.
Didn't the price of the actual barrel became more onerous than the product itself during covid?
My understanding from some of these articles is that oil isn't literally transported in barrels the vast majority of the time, it's in tanker trucks/rail cars/ships moving from source to refinery to retail the whole way. Part of what makes it fun to "buy a barrel of oil" is that you can't go many places and ask for a barrel, you need to bring the thing to put it in (like a tanker truck or rail car).
For carbon footprint also, I believe. For bottled water at least, manufacturing the bottle has by far the most environmental impact, even more so than the shipping/transportation part of the process (which you'd think would be severe, as water is heavy).
I tried to buy a foot of yarn but no one offered it packaged in feet
Did they pay extra for the barrel itself? Surely that steel doesn't come for free.