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Oil is Dirt Cheap… Literally [Chart]

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Oil is Dirt Cheap... Literally [Chart]

Oil is Dirt Cheap… Literally [Chart]

A barrel of oil is the same price as a barrel of “Scott’s Turf Builder”

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

In theory, a barrel of crude oil seems quite valuable.

It’s well-known, for example, that from one barrel of oil, a refinery can make 19 gallons of gasoline, 12 gallons of diesel, and four gallons of jet fuel.

That’s the equivalent of six billion joules of energy, or enough to power the average U.S. household for 1.8 months.

A Dirt Cheap Experiment

However, sometimes the laws of supply and demand work in mysterious ways. While it seems like oil has good intrinsic value, the glut of supply available to the market is so great that “black gold” has become very cheap.

Some would even say “dirt cheap”.

As a part of our landmark investigation, we went all the way to the Home Depot’s website to verify if this were actually true. The results were astonishing, and this information will definitely be helpful the next time I need to do some gardening.

PriceBags NeededCost per barrel
Loose bulk top soil$204.000.04$8.48
Miracle Gro$7.972.81$22.38
Scotts Turf Builder$6.973.74$26.09
Crude Oil (WTI)$31.72
Proven Winners$10.993.74$41.13

We started by going for the bulk stuff.

For only $135, it’s possible to buy 5 cubic yards of loose bulk top soil. That’s enough for 24 barrels worth, which seemed like a steal. The only downside was that it cost an extra $69 to schedule a dump truck to come by our house, which made it likely overkill for this experiment.

Next, we checked out a bag of Miracle Gro. It’s got the brand name reputation, and this particular bag had a user rating of four stars. At $7.97 for a two cubic feet, we’d just need just less than three bags to fill up a barrel. That works out to $22.38 a barrel. Not bad.

However, if we’re going to be serious about our dirt, we’re going to need something that promotes a strong root system and creates a prime seed-growing environment. We took a peek at Scotts Turf Builder, which is only $6.97 per bag. However, with only 1.5 cubic feet per bag, it’s going to take up over 3.7 to fill up our barrel, bringing our total cost to $26.09.

We’re now within $1.50 of oil’s 52-week low of $27.56.

The Winner

As we continued to shop online for dirt, a five-star gem caught our eye. The brand name was Proven Winners. How could we go wrong with that?

We took a look at the user reviews to be sure.

“I have a high-quality soil-test kit and tested this soil. It is very high in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, so though it will be excellent for plants it is NOT a soil for starting seeds or potting up seedlings,” wrote a previous buyer.

Noted. We will not use it for starting seeds or potting up seedlings. We checked out the price, and for $10.99 per bag containing 1.5 cubic feet, we had our winner. It takes 3.7 of these to fill up our barrel, bringing our cost per barrel of this particularly good dirt to $41.13.

Unfortunately that’s about $10 more than a barrel of oil, but I guess we’ll hedge our bets.

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Ranked: The World’s 50 Top Countries by GDP, by Sector Breakdown

This graphic shows GDP by country, broken down into three main sectors: services, industry, and agriculture.

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Visualized: The Three Pillars of GDP, by Country

Over the last several decades, the service sector has fueled the economic activity of the world’s largest countries. Driving this trend has been changes in consumption, the easing of trade barriers, and rapid advancements in tech.

We can see this in the gross domestic product (GDP) breakdown of each country, which gets divided into three broad sectors: services, industry, and agriculture.

The above graphic from Pranav Gavali shows GDP by country, and how each sector contributes to an economy’s output, with data from the World Bank.

Drivers of GDP, by Country

As the most important and fastest growing component of GDP, services make up almost 60% of GDP in the world’s 50 largest countries. Following this is the industrial sector which includes the production of raw goods.

Below, we show how each sector contributes to GDP by country as of 2021:

CountryServices
(% GDP)
Industry
(% GDP)
Agriculture
(% GDP)
Other
(% GDP)
GDP (T)
🇺🇸 U.S.77.617.91.03.6$22.9
🇨🇳 China53.539.37.20.0$16.9
🇯🇵 Japan69.928.81.00.4$5.1
🇩🇪 Germany62.926.70.99.5$4.2
🇬🇧 UK71.617.30.710.4$3.1
🇫🇷 France70.316.71.611.4$2.9
🇮🇳 India47.926.117.38.7$2.9
🇮🇹 Italy65.022.71.910.4$2.1
🇨🇦 Canada*67.724.11.76.6$2.0
🇰🇷 South Korea57.032.41.88.8$1.8
🇧🇷 Brazil57.820.27.514.6$1.6
🇦🇺 Australia65.725.52.36.5$1.6
🇷🇺 Russia54.131.83.910.3$1.6
🇪🇸 Spain67.420.42.69.6$1.4
🇲🇽 Mexico59.230.83.96.1$1.3
🇮🇩 Indonesia42.839.813.34.1$1.2
🇮🇷 Iran47.338.012.42.3$1.1
🇳🇱 Netherlands69.417.91.511.2$1.0
🇨🇭 Switzerland71.924.60.62.8$0.8
🇹🇷 Turkiye52.831.15.510.6$0.8
🇹🇼 Taiwan60.638.01.50.0$0.8
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia46.544.72.76.1$0.8
🇵🇱 Poland56.927.92.213.0$0.7
🇧🇪 Belgium68.819.60.710.9$0.6
🇸🇪 Sweden65.022.51.311.3$0.6
🇮🇱 Israel72.417.21.39.1$0.5
🇦🇷 Argentina52.523.67.116.8$0.5
🇦🇹 Austria62.425.81.210.5$0.5
🇳🇬 Nigeria43.831.423.41.4$0.5
🇹🇭 Thailand56.335.08.70.0$0.5
🇮🇪 Ireland55.437.81.05.8$0.5
🇭🇰 Hong Kong89.76.00.14.3$0.4
🇩🇰 Denmark66.719.30.913.1$0.4
🇸🇬 Singapore70.324.40.05.3$0.4
🇿🇦 South Africa63.024.52.510.0$0.4
🇵🇭 Philippines61.028.910.10.0$0.4
🇪🇬 Egypt52.531.211.44.9$0.4
🇧🇩 Bangladesh51.333.311.63.7$0.4
🇳🇴 Norway51.836.31.710.2$0.4
🇻🇳 Vietnam41.237.512.68.8$0.4
🇲🇾 Malaysia51.637.89.61.1$0.4
🇦🇪 U.A.E.51.647.50.90.0$0.4
🇵🇰 Pakistan52.118.822.76.4$0.3
🇵🇹 Portugal64.719.62.213.5$0.3
🇫🇮 Finland60.324.12.313.4$0.3
🇨🇴 Colombia58.024.97.69.5$0.3
🇷🇴 Romania59.126.74.59.6$0.3
🇨🇿 Czechia58.830.31.89.1$0.3
🇨🇱 Chile54.431.33.610.6$0.3
🇳🇿 New
Zealand*
65.620.45.78.4$0.2

Industrial sector includes construction. Agriculture sector includes forestry and fishing. *Data as of 2019.

In the U.S., services make up nearly 78% of GDP. Apart from Hong Kong, it comprises the highest share of GDP across the world’s largest economies. Roughly 80% of American jobs in the private sector are in services, spanning from healthcare and entertainment to finance and logistics.

Like America, a growing share of China’s GDP is from services, contributing to almost 54% of total economic output, up from 44% in 2010. This can be attributed to rising incomes and higher productivity in the sector as the economy has grown and matured, among other factors.

In a departure from the top 10 biggest countries globally, agriculture continues to drive a large portion of India’s GDP. India is the world’s second largest producer of wheat and rice, with agriculture accounting for 44% of the country’s employment.

While the services sector has grown in India, it makes up a greater share in other emerging economies such as Brazil (58%), Mexico (59%), and the Philippines (61%).

Growth Dynamics

Services-led growth has risen faster than manufacturing across many developing nations, underpinned by productivity growth.

This structural shift is seen across economies. In many countries in Africa, for instance, jobs have increasingly moved from agriculture to services and trade, where it now accounts for 42% of jobs.

These growth patterns are supported by rising incomes in developing economies, while innovation in tech is lowering barriers to enabling service growth. As the industrial sector makes up a lower share of trade and economic activity, the service sector is projected to make up 77% of global GDP by 2035.

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