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Comment by sgt

10 hours ago

Did they pay extra for the barrel itself? Surely that steel doesn't come for free.

You can sell the barrel after you are done

  • 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.

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    • 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.

    • I have one for making into a little stove with a kit from Amazon and lots of people use metal barrels for burning trash in rural areas. They are super cheap though like $10.

Didn't the price of the actual barrel became more onerous than the product itself during covid?

  • This is common for a huge number of products, ranging from cosmetics, consumables, pharmaceuticals, bottled water, etc.

    • 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).

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