page_title: Barrel
section_title: Oil storage
hierarchical_section_title: Barrel / Uses today / Oil storage
caption_attribution_description: Photo from the United States Department of Energy of a Standard Oil "blue barrel".
context_page_description: A barrel or cask is a hollow cylindrical container with a bulging center, longer than it is wide. They are traditionally made of wooden staves and bound by wood or metal hoops. The word vat is often used for large containers for liquids, usually alcoholic beverages; a small barrel or cask, typically with capacity of not more than ten gallons, is known as a keg.
  Modern wooden barrels for wine-making are made of French common oak, white oak, or American white oak and typically have standard sizes: "Bordeaux type" 225 litres, "Burgundy type" 228 litres and "Cognac type" 300 litres. Modern barrels and casks can also be made of aluminum, stainless steel, and different types of plastic, such as HDPE.
  Someone who makes barrels is called a "barrel maker" or cooper.
  Barrels have a variety of uses, including storage of liquids such as water, oil, and alcohol arrack, and sake. They are also employed to hold maturing beverages such as wine, cognac, armagnac, sherry, port, whiskey, and beer. Other commodities once stored in wooden casks include gunpowder, meat, fish, paint, honey, nails and tallow.
context_section_description: Wooden casks of various sizes were used to store whale oil on ships in the age of sail. Its viscous nature made sperm whale oil a particularly difficult substance to contain in staved containers and oil coopers were probably the most skilled coopers in pre-industrial cooperage. Olive oil, seed oils and other organic oils were also placed in wooden casks for storage or transport.
  Wooden casks were also used to store mineral oil. The standard size barrel of crude oil or other petroleum product (abbreviated bbl) is 42 US gallons (35.0 imp gal; 159.0 L). This measurement originated in the early Pennsylvania oil fields, and permitted both British and American merchants to refer to the same unit, based on the old English wine measure, the tierce.
  Earlier, another size of whiskey barrel was the most common size; this was the 40 US gallons (33.3 imp gal; 151.4 L) barrel for proof spirits, which was of the same volume as five US bushels. However, by 1866, the oil barrel was standardized at 42 US gallons.
  Oil has not been shipped in barrels since the introduction of oil tankers, but the 42 US gallon size is still used as a unit for measurement, pricing, and in tax and regulatory codes. Each barrel is refined into about 20 US gallons (17 imp gal; 76 L) of gasoline, the rest becoming other products such as jet fuel and heating oil, using fractional distillation.
caption: Standard Oil Company blue 55-US gallon (44 imp gal, 200 L) barrel (drum)
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