The Barrel is a free visual reference showing exactly what comes out of one barrel of crude oil when it's refined. It answers the questions people have been asking for decades: how many gallons in a barrel of oil? How many litres? What percentage becomes petrol vs diesel vs jet fuel?
"How many gallons in a barrel of crude oil?" is one of the most searched energy questions on the internet. The answer is simple (42 US gallons), but most sites either give you a one-line answer with no context, or bury it in a 3,000-word article about the oil industry. We wanted something visual, interactive, and instantly useful.
The breakdown percentages are based on data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), and Energy Education resources. The standard refinery output is approximately 45% gasoline, 27% diesel, 9% jet fuel, with the remainder split between hydrocarbon gas liquids, petrochemical feedstocks, heavy fuel oil, asphalt, and other products.
The interactive barrel counter lets you scale these figures for any number of barrels, and the unit toggle converts between US gallons, litres, UK gallons, and cubic metres.
One thing that surprises people: a 42-gallon barrel of crude produces about 45 gallons of refined products. This isn't an error — it's called "processing gain." When heavy crude molecules are cracked into lighter products during refining, the total volume increases by about 7% because lighter liquids take up more space than denser ones.
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