Comment by johannes1234321
7 hours ago
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.
Hello, my family has property with nat gas and some oil wells on it, and I've been out in the field with relatives that work in the industry.
In small fields they'll typically have larger tanks from the 1,000 to 10,000 gallon size. Wells typically also produce some water and small amounts of nat gas so they'll have some way to either store or burn the gas, and they'll either separate the water on site for disposal, or have a mixed oil/water product that is seperated at a later stage.
If the node isn't on a pipeline a vacuum/pump truck will show up either when the alerting systems hit a particular level, or when a particular interval of time has passed to ensure the equipment is still working.
Modern bulk pump trucks are simply the fastest way to move the product. No one in it for profit is going to move the unrefined product in amounts that small. It's not valuable enough.
How long ago was it that it was shipped in barrels? At some point it must have been, but the lore of oil history is not something I'm familiar with.
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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 live in Texas like another reply and those barrels are all over the place. They get used for everything from trash bins to bbqs. Also, old drill pipe is used for 99% of the pipe fences you see on farms/ranches.
There is.
https://www.purepac.co.uk/shop/category/drums/plastic-and-st...
Those are 200L, a "barrel" as a unit for crude oil is ca. 159 liter.
Now for some use that may be fine, but that also requires proper cleaning (following environment proection rules etc)
My question was more like a cycle. The metal itself certainly got some value as well.
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.