Questions
Can you buy a barrel of oil?
The questions people actually arrive with — what a barrel is, why you cannot buy a single one, how much it weighs, and what this website is — answered properly.
A parody shop — nothing here is for sale
Buying a barrel of oil
Can you buy a barrel of oil?
In principle yes, and in practice almost never in the way people mean. Crude oil trades in futures contracts, and the standard West Texas Intermediate contract is 1,000 barrels — roughly 159,000 litres, or about 136 tonnes. That arrives by tanker or pipeline. No broker or producer will quote you a price for one barrel to take home, because the physical logistics do not scale down that far.
Can you buy a single barrel of oil?
Not from a broker, a producer or an exchange. The smallest unit on the main benchmarks is 1,000 barrels, and to trade even that you need a brokerage account, margin and a tolerance for losing money in sizeable multiples. Retail listings that advertise "a barrel of oil" are almost always selling you the steel drum, and the drum is empty.
Can you buy a physical barrel of oil?
You can buy the barrel — a 55-gallon steel drum is a real and genuinely useful object with plenty of industrial suppliers. Filling it with crude and taking delivery is a different matter: it needs a contract, a terminal, a transporter and a buyer who deals in volumes measured in thousands of barrels. This website sells none of that. It is a simulation, and no drum will ever be dispatched.
How much is a barrel of oil?
It changes constantly, which is exactly why this site does not quote a real number anywhere: any figure frozen into a page becomes wrong within hours. Every price here is invented in your browser, and priced at pocket-change levels — free delivery over $50 — which is the wrong order of magnitude for crude oil and is the point of the joke. For an actual price, look at a live market source.
How do you buy crude oil?
The realistic routes are a futures contract through a broker, an exchange-traded fund, or shares in companies that produce oil. All of them need an account, all of them carry real financial risk, and none of them result in oil arriving at your house. This website is not a route to any of them — nothing here is an offer, a quote or a price.
Is it legal to buy a barrel of oil?
Yes. Buying oil is not the regulated part. What is regulated is the trading of futures contracts and who is permitted to be sold them, along with transport, storage and environmental rules once the oil physically moves. The barrier for an individual is contractual and logistical rather than legal — the minimum trade size is far bigger than one barrel.
Can you buy barrels of oil on the stock market?
You can buy exposure to the oil price, but you are buying shares or contracts rather than barrels. No equity purchase comes with a barrel attached to it, and holding a futures contract to expiry obliges you to settle at a delivery point rather than unload anything from a van.
Where can you buy a barrel of oil?
You cannot buy a single barrel, but you can buy exposure to the price: a futures contract through a broker, an exchange-traded fund, or shares in a company that produces oil. Physical crude changes hands between refiners, traders and terminal operators in volumes measured in thousands of barrels. Anything advertised as a single barrel delivered to your home is a steel drum, a novelty item, or a scam.
Barrel sizes, drums and tankers
How big is a barrel of oil in gallons and litres?
A standard barrel of oil is 42 US gallons, which is about 159 litres. That is a unit of volume inherited from 1860s Pennsylvania barrel-makers rather than a physical object you would recognise.
How many litres in a barrel of oil?
158.99 litres, normally rounded to 159. The 42 US gallon figure is the industry standard worldwide, though you will also see cargo and terminal documents quoting cubic metres, where one barrel is 0.159 cubic metres.
What is the difference between a barrel of oil and a 55-gallon drum?
Thirteen gallons. A 55-gallon steel drum holds about 208 litres, while the barrel unit is about 159 litres, so the drum is larger than the barrel it is constantly confused with. This is the single most common mix-up in the subject: if you are buying a drum to store something in, you are buying 55 gallons, and you are not buying a barrel of oil.
How much does a barrel of oil weigh?
It depends on the density of the grade, which is why oil people work in barrels per tonne instead. Typical crude runs at roughly 7.3 barrels to the metric tonne, so one barrel weighs about 136 kilograms, or around 300 pounds. Heavy, dense grades weigh more per barrel and light grades weigh less.
Where can you buy an oil drum?
Any industrial supplier, and often secondhand from food, chemical or fuel businesses that have finished with them. Decent steel drums get reused many times because a clean 55-gallon drum is a durable and useful thing. Buy one — just do not expect it to contain 42 gallons of crude oil, because those are two different volumes.
Why is a barrel of oil 42 gallons?
Wooden barrels and habit, rather than any kind of design. When production took off in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, producers shipped crude in whatever casks were to hand, and those were very often 40-gallon whisky and wine barrels. Buyers wanted a margin to cover leakage and short measure, 42 gallons became the number everyone settled on, and it was then written into contracts, codified in US petroleum measurement and inherited by every oil market in the world. Nobody chose 42 gallons. It simply stuck.
Why is oil sold in barrels?
Because barrels were how oil was first moved, and the unit outlived the container by more than a century. Oil has not travelled in wooden barrels for well over a hundred years — it goes by pipeline, tanker, barge and rail — but contracts, futures, market reports and national statistics are all still denominated in the barrel. Switching to tonnes or cubic metres would mean rewriting an entire global industry's paperwork for no practical gain, so the barrel survives as a unit of account rather than an object.
How many gallons are in an oil drum?
Fifty-five US gallons, which is about 208 litres. That is a larger and entirely different volume from a barrel of oil at 42 US gallons, or roughly 159 litres, and the two are confused constantly. An oil drum holds thirteen gallons more than a barrel. The useful way to remember it is that a barrel of oil is a unit of measurement, while a 55-gallon drum is a physical object you can buy.
What are the dimensions of a 55-gallon drum?
A standard closed-top 55 US gallon steel drum is 22.5 inches (571 mm) in diameter and 33.5 inches (851 mm) tall, which gives a circumference of about 70.7 inches (1,795 mm). Its internal volume is 55 US gallons — 208 litres, or 7.35 cubic feet. Open-top drums with a removable lid and locking ring are a fraction taller because of the lid assembly. These are the de facto worldwide dimensions, which is exactly why drums stack and palletise as predictably as they do.
How much does a 55-gallon drum weigh?
An empty steel drum weighs roughly 20 kilograms, or about 45 pounds, depending on the thickness of the steel — heavier 16-gauge drums sit at the top of that range and thinner 20-gauge ones below it. Filled with water a drum weighs about 228 kilograms or 500 pounds in total, because 55 US gallons of water is 208 kilograms before you add the drum. Filled with crude oil it is lighter, around 200 kilograms, since oil is less dense than water.
How many litres in a 55-gallon drum?
208 litres. Multiply 55 US gallons by 3.785 litres to the gallon and you get 208.2 litres, usually rounded to 208. That is a different and larger volume from a barrel of oil at about 159 litres, so a drum holds roughly a third again as much as the barrel it is so often confused with.
How many barrels are in a 55-gallon drum?
About 1.31. Divide 55 US gallons by the 42 gallons in a barrel of oil and you get 1.3095 barrels. So a full 55-gallon drum holds a little over one and a third barrels of oil, which is a useful number the next time someone treats a drum and a barrel as the same object. They are not the same object, and the drum is the larger of the two by thirteen gallons.
What is an oil drum actually used for?
Storing and moving liquids and powders of almost every kind. The 55-gallon steel drum became a worldwide standard in the mid-20th century because it was cheap, stackable, rollable by one person and highly reusable — fuel, lubricants, solvents, food-grade oils, chemicals, coatings, even powders such as cement travel in them. Crude oil is one of many possible cargoes, and the drums you see in yards are mostly not holding any.
Can a barrel of oil explode?
Crude oil is combustible rather than explosive, and it is the vapour rather than the liquid that burns. That leads to a counter-intuitive safety point: a full sealed drum is considerably less dangerous than an empty one, because a drum that has been emptied still holds enough flammable vapour in exactly the right air-to-fuel mix to ignite. Emptied drums are treated as hazardous for that reason and are usually returned to the supplier rather than left lying about. This website, for the record, has no drums and therefore nothing to explode.
How many barrels of oil are in a tanker?
It depends entirely on the ship. A very large crude carrier of around 300 metres carries roughly two million barrels, which is about 318 million litres or 273,000 tonnes. Smaller tankers carry tens of thousands of barrels, and coastal barges far fewer. For scale, one large vessel is about two thousand times the smallest tradable futures contract.
How many cubic feet in a 55 gallon drum?
About 7.35 cubic feet. One US gallon is 0.1337 cubic feet, so 55 gallons comes to 7.35 cubic feet, which is the same volume as 0.208 cubic metres or 208 litres. If you are ordering a drum or working out whether one fits in a space, the cubic feet figure is usually the one you want.
What can you do with a used 55 gallon drum?
Plenty, which is why they are rarely scrapped. Clean steel drums get repurposed as rain barrels, planters, burn barrels, feed or tool storage, and very commonly cut in half lengthwise to make a barbecue or a smoker. If the drum will touch anything you eat or drink, look for one that previously held food-grade oil rather than industrial chemicals. A drum that held solvents or unknown chemicals is not worth the risk and belongs with a licensed waste handler instead.
How many barrels of oil does the world use in a day?
Roughly 100 million barrels a day, a figure that moves with the economy and the season. For scale, that is about 15.9 billion litres, or 13.6 million tonnes, every day. It is also around one hundred thousand times the 1,000-barrel minimum on a single futures contract, which is a useful way to picture just how far a retail barrel is from the real market.
This website
Is Barrel Never Pumps a real shop?
No. It is a work of parody and fiction. No payments are processed, no card is ever charged, no inventory is held and no barrels exist. The shopping experience is real — the cart works, prices recalculate, the checkout validates — but there is nothing at the end of it.
What is a fake online shopping simulator?
A website that recreates the whole ritual of shopping online — browsing, filtering, adding to a cart, choosing pack sizes, checking out, getting a confirmation — with no possibility of buying anything at the end. Barrel Never Pumps is one of those, for crude oil. It exists because a well-built checkout is one of the most frictionless pieces of software we use, and aiming all of that machinery at a product nobody can buy in the quantity offered turns out to be funny.
Why build a fake shop for crude oil, of all things?
Because the mismatch is already there in real life. A barrel of oil is the most-quoted commodity on earth and also something no individual can buy a single unit of, which makes it the perfect subject for a shop that takes an order and cannot possibly fill it. The warmth of the presentation is deliberate: the failure is structural, not unfriendly.
Will I be charged?
Never. There is no payment code anywhere in this project and no endpoint to send anything to. The card form only accepts a short list of publicly published test card numbers, the same ones used in payment documentation and testing, and it stores nothing except the brand and the last four digits, for the receipt line.
Will the barrels turn up?
They will not, because they do not exist. Your order is accepted and then diverted to a rival city of the one you asked for, usually the other half of a well-known local rivalry, and the confirmation screen reports this as a success. Please do not clear the driveway or source steel drums, however convincing it looks.
What are the 22 origins and 156 grades?
Real oil provinces and real crude grade names, grouped by where the oil comes from — the North Sea, the Niger Delta, the Permian Basin and so on. The names are accurate industry terms used for parody. Everything attached to them is invented: the price, the rating, the review count, the loading time, the stock level and the regional greeting on arrival.
What is physical delivery mode?
A toggle that changes how seriously the site takes itself, and nothing else. Switching it on asks you to prepare steel drums and arrange a loading bay, then continues not to send a lorry. It has no effect on anything real.
Do the stamps and badges mean anything?
They are a small collectible layer stored in your own browser: a stamp for each origin you have added a barrel from, plus a handful of badges for milestones such as using a test card or cancelling a few deliveries. They are not saved to an account, because there are no accounts and no sign-in.
Why does the site look so friendly and professional?
Because the joke only works if the shop is genuinely good. A cartoon would be a different, simpler kind of parody. Here the typography, spacing and checkout all behave the way competent retail software does, and the only thing missing is the goods.
Do the prices change between visits?
No. Each grade is priced from a hash of its own identifier, so the same barrel always costs the same amount, on the server that renders the page and in your browser afterwards. The prices are nonsense, but they are consistently nonsense.
Cards, data and safety
Which cards can I use?
Only the published test card numbers — the openly documented ones that appear in payment documentation, such as the 4242 and 5555 ranges. The form checks the Luhn checksum and will refuse anything that is not on that list, so a real card number is rejected rather than accepted. This is on purpose: the site is built so it is incapable of holding a real card.
Is my card or address stored anywhere?
No. The card number is never stored and never leaves your browser — only the brand and the last four digits are kept, so the receipt can say something. The delivery address is used to pick the rival city and is then discarded without being saved. Nothing on this site is sent to a server, because there is no server to send it to.
What is stored in my browser, and how do I delete it?
Cart contents, order history, visited origins, stamps, badges and a couple of preference flags, all under a single browser storage key. There are no cookies and no analytics. Pressing the reset button clears everything, and clearing site data for this domain does the same thing.
Does this site work offline?
Once the page has loaded, essentially yes. All the pricing, ratings, reviews, event generation and checkout logic runs in your browser, so nothing needs to call home. There is nothing to call home to.
Is any of this financial advice?
No, and it would be actively bad advice if it were. Nothing here is a quote, a forecast, a recommendation or an offer to trade anything. The blog generates invented market news from randomised fake events purely for amusement. If you want real oil market information, use a real market source.
Still not sure what this place is?
It is a work of parody with a working cart and nothing to sell. Theabout pageexplains what it is for, theprivacy pagelists exactly what is stored in your browser, and theterms pagecovers everything else. If you want real oil market information, use a real market source — not the blog, which invents its own news.