bcm versus km Dear Gene Nygaard You said that generally everyone understands km I am not sure about this statement and find this use quite unusual and misleading Could you please give any example in gas industry where km is used maybe just some newspaper article Also if you d could find any article in wikipeedia about gas fileds or pipelines which use km I would like to get a reference Google natural gas km3 823 hits Note that Google as far as I know won t search for the character but this gets those that use either html superscripts or just km3 and the like There are other ways to find more of them You will of course find many using bcm as well But as I pointed out that may be jargon used within the industry but it is not known outside the industry there might possibly be other little pockets of its usage in other contexts even less known another search on AltaVista km natural gas 3130 hits AltaVista appears to treat and 3 as synonymous unlike Google You can limit them to gov sites or to edu sites too to see that this isn t newspaper usage but in fact more likely to take place in more serious and professional contexts BTW if you were arguing about tcf you d maybe have a better case That is common enough in the industry more so than bcm that it is better known outside the industry too I am able to use different search engages However could you please give any example of use km as an unit of capacity of gas pipeline Concerning tcf trillion cubic feet it s used more in the US gas industry while bcm is used mainly in Europe Don t see problem with this If you look the external links of this artcile you will find both tcf and bcm depending of the source In the petroleum industry the unit systems used are Oilfield and Metric like what was mentoned above all depending on where you are and who you are working with However I have never come across km being used to describe gas field sizes or gas production and if someone was to describe a field or gas production in such a way to someone in the industry it would have no revelace to them it is not a standard of unit It would have to be Bcm Mcm E3M3 Bcf Tcf MMscf Mscf etc Surely we writing for a general audience not only for people in certain industries km is standard SI if some people in some industry want to use something else then that s their problem P S Hello Gene mp Very true Jimp we are writing for a general audience And when i searched some news articles by the likes of Forbes CNN Money etc on Google news in the past month for the phrase km3 in relation to gas gasfield gas field natural gas it returns one result from Petroleum World However the units tcf bcf bcm return at least 102 147 51 hits when used with the above phrases And these are from Forbes Reuters CNN Money Globe and mail which i think you would agree are also writing for the General Audience The numbers are in their hundreds of thousands when you do just a general web search for tcf bcf and bcm compared to the 823 km3 turns up So its not really just some people in some industry using these terms Cheers Sure it is But that s beside the point we at Wikipedia choose to use standard unit symbols not all the various off the cuff possibilities and km is the standard symbol for 1 000 000 000 m It isn t surprising at all that financial magazines are too innumerate when it comes to units of measure to even understand what they are so sure they get passed on unchanged So what Sorting on s Are you quite sure that s should be sorted under o The is a separate character and is sorted separately in Danish a b c y z talk Yes it s sorted differently in Danish But this i