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Comment by fragmede

15 hours ago

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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fragmede

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conductr  15 hours ago

Went down the Google rabbit hole, this article is the best summary I found (in 3 minutes of reading). Basically, wood barrels were first used as that’s just what existed from wine. It didn’t hold up so the iconic 55 gallon steel barrel was invented. The industry outgrew it and could save a lot on shipping/handling if they developed pipelines and tankers. Each of these transition took a few decades, but also pretty much follow the industrial advancements that occurred from the 1850s to the 1950s.

https://www.skolnik.com/blog/oils-long-history-with-the-55-g...

  • fragmede  13 hours ago

    Good find! So I'd need to set my time machine to 1949 in order tknve able to bring back an actual 55 gallon drum of oil. Hope I don't mess up the timeline with my souvenir!

    • fuzzfactor  26 minutes ago

      More like 1859 :)

      https://aoghs.org/transportation/history-of-the-42-gallon-oi...

      A BBL is not just a standard quantity equal to 42 US gallons.

      It's 42 US gallons @ 60 DEG F.

      Now when they discovered oil in western Pennsylvania, one day there were farmers, the next day they were rich farmers.

      They might not have had the highest education, but they didn't like getting ripped off. What was sought was precise 42 gallon liquid-tight wooden casks. So it could be assured if the barrel was within a couple inches of full, it contained a good 42 gallons.

      When the oil made its way to a major port, there would be a large change of custody, and the buyers would want to be sure it was all there according to the documents.

      This is when the cargo surveyors would inventory the barrels as they were being loaded on to the ships, plus check for fullness by opening the cork and sticking in their thumb. The replaced corks were often then sealed with wax identifying the inspector.

      In the oilfield and the port this is how a very trusted barrel-maker ended up becoming a surveyor.

      Plus it was somewhat recognized that liquids expand with heat and shrink with cold. With oil, different oils respond to temperature to different degrees.

      This was well-established scientifically for generations with vegetable oils and whale oils, but was something new for petroleum companies to grasp.

      In the laboratory, the surveyors made independent precise tables to correct oils for temperature, this was really essential after many barrels were emptied into a large storage tank, like they were long using for things like molasses or whale oil. The tank temperature is measured, and corrections are made to determine the billable quantity of BBL there would be if it was actually 60 DEG F.

      And so it started out with surveyors having technology quite a bit beyond what oil companies had. (The unspoken thing is that the surveyor has to be trustworthy more so than the oil company.)

      Well, I have always refused to relent :)

      With numerous gifted engineers and now even an abundance of PhD's, the majors with their resources have been unlimited for quite some time before I was born, compared to my labs being minuscule by comparison.

      So what. A significant part of my life's work is carrying on the technology advantage that I directly inherited from that 19th century origin anyway. I just could never settle for what many oil companies settle for using the latest instrumentation & techniques over the decades. Chemicals too, with way more byzantine technology needs, but they're mostly billed by weight, not volume. Plenty of room for improvement across the board.

      I guess I'm an energy guy, but have always been interested in solar more than oil, too bad there was no way that would pay the bills during the Reagan Recession, so I joined a hundred-year-old company when the startup research lab I was helping build ended up imploding. There was also one notable ex-plosion too, which happened seconds after I was there taking a reading, and it was an engineering defect. Since I was almost a victim I had to overengineer the weaknesses that the actual engineers had failed at. You get used to it after a while.

      People are just not careful enough, whether it's equations or toxins :\