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Oil Barrels to Liters Converter

Enter oil barrels to convert to litres and gallons.

How it is calculated

One oil barrel is defined as 42 US gallons, and one US gallon is 3.785411784 litres, so litres = barrels × 158.987295 and US gallons = barrels × 42. Both results are rounded to two decimals. The conversion is a straight multiplication with a fixed factor, so it is exact for any quantity from a fraction of a barrel to millions. The tool does not check the sign: a negative number returns a negative volume, which can be useful for a stock change. Note that this is the petroleum barrel; barrels used for beer, wine or other liquids hold different volumes, and the gallon here is the US gallon, not the larger imperial gallon.

Worked example

An oil field produces 750 barrels in a day. Litres: 750 × 158.987295 = 119,240.47 L (about 119.2 cubic metres). US gallons: 750 × 42 = 31,500.00 gal. As a check, 31,500 gallons × 3.785411784 litres per gallon gives the same 119,240 litres. Dividing by 1,000 gives the same volume in cubic metres, which is the unit many storage tank specifications use.

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Common mistakes

  • Using the factor for a different kind of barrel. Beer, wine and other trade barrels differ in size; only the 42-gallon petroleum barrel equals 158.987 litres.
  • Mixing up US and imperial gallons. The gallon result here is the US gallon (3.785 L); an imperial gallon is about 4.546 L, so the numbers will not match a UK source.
  • Confusing barrels with barrels of oil equivalent or with cubic metres. A figure of million barrels per day is volume, not energy, and 1 cubic metre is about 6.29 barrels.
  • Applying it to weight. Barrels are a volume; the mass of a barrel depends on the crude's density, which this tool does not use.
  • Dropping a zero when entering large numbers such as 1,000,000 barrels. A single zero changes the answer tenfold, so check the thousands separators.

About this calculator

The oil barrel (bbl) is the standard unit for pricing and trading crude oil, historically standardized at 42 US gallons, which equals 158.987 litres. The unit dates back to 19th-century Pennsylvania oil, where 42-gallon wooden barrels became the trade standard partly because that size accounted for evaporation and leakage during shipping.

Because oil benchmarks like WTI and Brent are quoted in dollars per barrel while most of the world measures volume in litres, this converter is useful for energy analysts, traders and anyone reconciling production or consumption figures reported in barrels against metric fuel data.

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Comments (1)

  • Editorial team

    The barrel here is the 42 US gallon oil barrel, not a beer barrel. One gives 158.99 L and 1,000 give 158,987.30 L, or 42,000.00 gallons. Crude is quoted at a standard temperature and the tool applies no density or temperature correction, so it will not convert volume to tonnes: that needs the density of the particular crude. Do you need tonnes through API gravity as well?

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