Transporting oil in 1859 was a challenge compared with today’s standards. Pennsylvania oil men in 1859, when oil was first discovered in America, would need a container to transport the newly produced oil to be refined. Teams of horses would transport wooden casks or barrels by wagons over rugged northwestern Pennsylvania landscape. Men would place the oil-filled casks onto river barges and then float the barges down the Allegheny River to Pittsburg. The oil would be processed there into kerosene, a highly sought-after product to be used in lamps.
Watertight containers or casks were originally used to ship everything from fish, molasses, wine, or whale oil, but oil men soon converted them for shipping oil. A “tierce,” an old unit of measure for capacity, was equivalent to one third of a pipe, or 42 wine gal.
42-gal barrel history
Watertight casks of different sizes were created by “tight coopers,” and lesser skilled craftsmen who made casks, barrels, and pails for dry goods were “slack coopers.” A wine puncheon, defined by England’s King Richard III, yielded a cask containing 84 gal while a tierce was smaller in size holding 42 gal. Around 1700, Pennsylvania cooperages started to manufacture this custom-made watertight cask, which became standard in shipping any type of commodity to local markets.
The first commercial US oil well, discovered in Titusville, Pa., by Edwin L. Drake in 1859, led to an oil boom that consumed these wooden tierces, whiskey barrels, and casks of all sizes. When filled with crude oil, a 42-gal tierce weighed more than 300 lb, about the limit for a man maneuvering the cask. A typical river barge of that period would hold around 20 casks or barrels—anything bigger was harder to maneuver and anything smaller was less lucrative.
In August 1866, Pennsylvania’s early oil producers agreed that the tierce-sized containers would constitute a barrel of oil and would be the standard unit of measure. This standard 42-gal barrel of oil was accepted by the Petroleum Producers Association in 1872 and by the US Geological Survey and the US Bureau of Mines in 1882.
Blue barrel
John D. Rockefeller in 1870 focused his newly formed Standard Oil Co. on efficiency and growth. Rockefeller, instead of purchasing oil barrels from local cooperages, bought his own oak timber, dried the timber, and hauled it to Cleveland, Ohio, by wagon to be built by his own cooperage. The cost of the wooden barrel went down from $3/bbl to less than $1.50/bbl.
Standard Oil’s early practice of painting its barrels blue soon became an oil field myth for the abbreviation of“bbl” and its origin. Many believed that the “bbl” stood for “blue barrel.” Shipping manifests in days well before the oil boom of 1859 included quantities of other commodities such as honey, whale oil, and rum that were distributed by “bbl.”
Typical yields
Processing needs have changed dramatically since the early oil days of the nineteenth when kerosene was the highly coveted refined product. Today’s refiners focus primarily on transportation fuels. In 2016, about 3.41 billon bbl of finished motor gasoline was consumed in the US, a daily average of 391.73 million gal, or 9.33 million b/d. According to the US Energy Information Administration, this is the largest consumption of motor gasoline on record.
A typical 42-gal barrel of oil will yield about 45 gal of petroleum product because of refinery processing gains. Motor gasoline is the largest petroleum product refined with about 20 gal, or 47%, generated from the initial barrel of oil. Other petroleum products include: ultra-low sulfur distillate, 11 bbl; jet fuel, 4 bbl; other product, 6 bbl; other distillate or heating oil, less than 1 bbl; heavy fuel, 1 bbl; and hydrocarbon gas liquids, 2 bbl.
Laura Bell-Hammer | Statistics Editor
Laura Bell-Hammer has been the Statistics Editor for the Oil & Gas Journal since 1994. She was the Survey Editor for two years prior to her current position with OGJ. While working with OGJ, she also was a contributing editor for Oil & Gas Financial Journal. Before joining OGJ, she worked for Vintage Petroleum in Tulsa, gaining her oil and gas industry knowledge.