oilfield units (13. 341)

Somewhat preoccupied with the engineering diglossia of customary and scientific units of measurement (see previously here, here and here)—no longer encountered pervasively as the UK have given up the Imperial system almost in totality (with a few outliers like fuel efficiency is still expressed in miles per gallon), we really enjoyed this rant about drilling a borehole of Babel over the petrodollar and US-imposed standards and conversions, courtesy of MetaFilter, which whilst maddening don’t lead to catastrophic miscalculations on a regular basis—punished for our own ambition and avarice with a confusion of the tongues in the form of ten thousand different metrics whose meaning can vary a lot in a discipline where precision counts. A barrel of crude is, incidentally, abbreviated BBL, after the blue barrels that Standard Oil adopted as its standard, with a volume of forty-two American gallons (approximately one hundred and fifty nine litres or thirty five Imperial gallons at standard temperature and pressure), with a thousand barrels not enumerated as KBBL (further Simpsons references below) but rather Mbbl (from the Roman mille) and a million barrels as MMbbl then returning to Greek prefixes for a billion barrels with giga- in Gbbl. In contrast, a barrel of beer is thirty six Imperial gallons or half a hogshead and the wine industry also has its own standards, though most of the world has adopted DIN of the Euro Keg of fifty litres. As for density, it is confusingly measured in MW, not megawattage but “mud weight,” pounds per gallon or pound cubic feet.  More insanity, pidgin and jargon to follow.