Barrels of oil

Chris looking at a ‘nodding donkey’ in Utah – a pump used to bring oil to the surface on land

I felt like I had to write about Trump’s strike on Venezuela this week. Is it Trump’s strike? Or the United States of America’s strike? While media typically attribute these actions to the country’s leader, allowing him to propagate his close-to-insane statements as normality for the world, there’s a whole country behind him…a country that elected him and isn’t holding him to account while he skews the world into a tailspin.

The USA has a history of targetting and kidnapping or killing world leaders they are aggrieved by, but that doesn’t make the action right. The USA is a signatory to the UN Charter in which Article 2(4) says members “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” There seems little question the military actions that uplifted Maduro and his wife were in contravention of international law, despite many countries pussy-footing around the issue, possibly because they are (justifiably) scared they might be next on the invasion list.

Of course, many countries are not on the invasion list because they don’t have strategic resources the USA would like to acquire. We all now know Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves at 300 million barrels – more than Saudi Arabia. A good trivia question to be able to answer. And top of the list as the next target is Greenland, which is situated strategically between the US and Russia and has large resources of rare earth elements (REE), critical to modern technologies and defense systems. Greenland is well down the list of REE resource holders (Brazil, India, Russia, Australia and Vietnam all have much more) but is comparable to the US (1.9 million tons in the US and 1.5 million tons in Greenland).

It seems unthinkable, or unsayable, for Trump to say he wants to take Greenland over because “We need to have Greenland from the point of view of national security…” I could say, “I need to take over our next-door-neighbour’s farm because I don’t want him to develop it and build houses which will threaten our views, privacy and security.” No one would take me seriously, even though I really really want to own it. But when its Trump, leader of a major global power, it’s as mad a statement but we have to take him seriously because he just kidnapped another country’s leader while saying the USA would now run the country and annex the country’s oil. I suppose I could annex the next-door-neighbour’s sheep though I don’t know what I would do with them.

Everyone figures the Venezuela-USA story is all about the oil rather than drugs, just like Gulf Wars were not about weapons of mass destruction. Trump says Venezuela will hand over 30-50 million barrels of stock-piled oil to the USA for the USA to sell. When I was reading this story on RNZ, I noticed the statement:

“CNN has reached out to the White House for more information. A senior administration official, speaking under condition of anonymity, told CNN that the oil has already been produced and put in barrels. The majority of it is currently on boats and will now go to US facilities in the Gulf to be refined.”

Really? The oil has been put in barrels? I imagine millions of barrels sitting around waiting to be taken. They couldn’t be stacked one on top of the other. Would they be in racks? That would require a storage area 368 x 368 x 368 barrels in size – 220m square and 322m high. Of course, no one will stack barrels 322m high. That would be dangerous, like Yurtle the Turtle.

Surely the oil isn’t actually put in barrels? We all know it is measured in barrels. But why is it measured in barrels?

The measurement of an ‘oil barrel’ dates from the early Pennsylvania oil fields. During the oil boom of the 1860s, a number of different size existing containers were used to store, transport, and sell oil – they were previously used for products such as beer, fish, molasses and turpentine. Barrel sizes included 40, 42 and 45 US gallons (noting the US gallon is 128 fluid ounces vs the UK 160 fluid ounces). However, buyers were not happy about the variety of barrel sizes – how could they know the exact quantity of product they would receive and the price per unit volume they would pay? Early oil producers settled on using the standard wine ‘tierce’, or cask, of 42 gallons, established by King Richard III. This standard was officially adopted by the Petroleum Producers’ Association in 1872 and the US Geological Survey and US Bureau of Mines in 1882.

I searched for how oil is transported and stored. As you would expect, transport is in pipelines and normal storage is in steel tanks – underground, or on ships, trains or trucks. There are a few random web articles saying crude oil is stored in barrels. However, the quantities of oil extracted, shipped and used would seem to make this impractical – somewhere around 100 million barrels a day is used worldwide. If you can put oil in a large tank, why would you store it in a 42 gallon barrel?

Where do you think the mistake occurred in the statement from the White House? Does someone in the White House really think oil is put in barrels? This is possible – the US kidnapped Venezuela’s leader then announced they would run the country without there being any apparent plan for who would do the running or how they would do it.

Or did the iterations of media reporting conflate the mention of 30-50 million barrels as a measure of quantity with a statement about storage?

Of course, it doesn’t really matter where the oil is kept. Truth left the storage facility a long time ago.