barrel per day
Volumetric flow rateexact by definition
The barrel per day is 42 US gallons a day, exactly 0.158987294928/86400 cubic metres per second, about 1.84 cm³/s. It is the fundamental unit of the petroleum industry: field production, refinery capacity and national output are all in barrels per day.
Watch out: The oil barrel of 42 US gallons is not the 31.5 gallon US liquid barrel, nor the 55 gallon drum everyone pictures, nor the 36 imperial gallon beer barrel. Only the petroleum one is 42 gallons, and only it is meant when a production figure says bbl.
| 1 bbl/d | 0.11040784 L/min |
The 42 gallon barrel came from the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s, borrowed from the tierce used in the herring and whale oil trades. Standard oil barrels were never actually 42 gallons of steel; the unit outlived the container by a century and a half.