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What Can Be Made from One Barrel of Oil?

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What Can Be Made from One Barrel of Oil?

What Can Be Made from One Barrel of Oil?

Oil gets a bad rap these days, but the stuff is actually quite incredible.

Many people think of crude oil as a thick, black liquid that is used to source our unquenchable thirst for gasoline. However, the reality is that each barrel of oil is refined to be used in a variety of applications that includes fuel, cosmetics, plastics, rubber, and candle wax.

What’s in one barrel of oil?

Today’s infographic comes from JWN Energy, an oil and gas news site. Using Chevron as a source, it shows 17 different things that can be made from each barrel of oil.

Here is everything that can be made from just one barrel of oil:

  • Enough gasoline to drive a medium-sized car over 450km (280 miles).
  • Enough distillate fuel to drive a large truck for almost 65km (40 miles). If jet fuel fraction is included, that same truck can run nearly 80km (50 miles).
  • Nearly 70 kWh of electricity at a power plant generated by residual fuel.
  • About 1.8 kg (4 lbs) of charcoal briquettes.
  • Enough propane to fill 12 small (14.1 ounce) cylinders for home, camping or workshop use.
  • Asphalt to make about 3.8 L (one gallon) of tar for patching roofs or streets.
  • Lubricants to make about a 0.95 L (one quart) of motor oil.
  • Wax for 170 birthday candles or 27 wax crayons.

But that’s not all. After producing all of the above products, there’s also enough petrochemicals leftover to be used as a base for one of the following:

  • 39 polyester shirts
  • 750 pocket combs
  • 540 toothbrushes
  • 65 plastic dustpans
  • 23 hula hoops
  • 65 plastic drinking cups
  • 195 one-cup measuring cups
  • 11 plastic telephone housings
  • 135 four-inch rubber balls

Oil is not a one-trick pony, and the gooey black liquid actually has thousands of applications. The above serves as one example of how a barrel could be used, but here’s a list of many other oil applications. It includes everything from guitar strings to antihistamines.

Whatever your opinion is of fossil fuels, it’s still pretty astonishing what can be produced out of each barrel of oil.

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Energy

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the U.S.

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Voronoi graphic visualizing U.S. reliance on Russian uranium

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on natural resource megatrends in your email.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. The bill must pass the Senate before becoming law.

In this graphic, we visualize how much the U.S. relies on Russian uranium, based on data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA).

U.S. Suppliers of Enriched Uranium

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian-produced oil and gas—yet Russian-enriched uranium is still being imported.

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the United States. In 2022, Russia supplied almost a quarter of the enriched uranium used to fuel America’s fleet of more than 90 commercial reactors.

Country of enrichment serviceSWU%
🇺🇸 United States3,87627.34%
🇷🇺 Russia3,40924.04%
🇩🇪 Germany1,76312.40%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom1,59311.23%
🇳🇱 Netherlands1,3039.20%
Other2,23215.79%
Total14,176100%

SWU stands for “Separative Work Unit” in the uranium industry. It is a measure of the amount of work required to separate isotopes of uranium during the enrichment process. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Most of the remaining uranium is imported from European countries, while another portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States called Urenco.

Similarly, nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium—and many of them are NATO-allied members and allies of Ukraine.

In 2023 alone, the U.S. nuclear industry paid over $800 million to Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, and its fuel subsidiaries.

It is important to note that 19% of electricity in the U.S. is powered by nuclear plants.

The dependency on Russian fuels dates back to the 1990s when the United States turned away from its own enrichment capabilities in favor of using down-blended stocks of Soviet-era weapons-grade uranium.

As part of the new uranium-ban bill, the Biden administration plans to allocate $2.2 billion for the expansion of uranium enrichment facilities in the United States.

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