Oil becomes more meaningful when you turn it into fuel.
A barrel contains 159 litres of crude oil, or 42 gallons.
To use this oil, it must be refined. The refining process produces various products, including petrol, diesel, jet fuel and numerous household items, such as cleaning products, plastics and even lotions.
Once refined, a barrel typically produces about 73 litres, or 19.35 gallons, of petrol to power cars and trucks.
A pick-up truck that can drive 24 miles on 1 gallon of petrol, or 100km on 10 litres, can travel about 730km, or 450 miles, from one barrel of oil.
Put another way, one barrel of crude oil can fuel that pick-up on a trip from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio.
Now let’s scale that up to US national consumption. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the US has about 285 million motor vehicles and consumes nearly 9 million barrels of petrol every day.
If all of Venezuela’s crude oil were refined into petrol, it could supply US vehicles for roughly 40 years at today’s consumption rate.
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