Not the answer you want when you ask a prospective romantic partner the question, "how many pickles do you eat?" But it's exactly the measure you're looking for when you ask someone about oil output.
We know what you're going to say: "when did a barrel become an accepted amount of anything?" We get it. We're all pretty comfortable with gallons and maybe liters (if we're dealing with Europeans or Canadians), but now we're going to start measuring oil (and only oil) in some arbitrary measure like "barrels." If you want to trade in mayonnaise futures, are they traded by the jar? Is cocoa traded in "mugfuls"?
We're afraid the "barrels" thing is just one of those historical quirks that comes along with having a financial market that stretches back to a time when people rode to work on horseback and wore silk socks and knee-britches. When they started using "barrels" as the accepted measure of an amount of oil, there was still farmland on Manhattan. It's just the way it is. (A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, by the way.)
If you run an oil production facility (like an offshore rig, or a field of those giant hammer-looking things that move up and down), then you measure the amount of oil you pull out of the ground in barrels per day. It's just how it goes.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What are petro dollars?8 Views
Finance allah shmoop what are petro dollars Well they're just
money received from the mining of this guy's blood and
guts because yeah oil that's where it comes from yesterday's
stegosaurus is today's refined petroleum and we're talking about a
massive amount of dollars here like you could call them
master dollars or t rex a dollars or try sarah
dollars big wealth in the nineteen seventies came from the
petro era in the same way that it's led today
by amazon facebook and google When oil prices suddenly spiked
in the seventies the people who won well they were
the ones who had massive oceans of it underground We're
looking atyou saudi arabia and you texas and in times
when there is so much money coming into a system
with a shock well the economic driver of that wealth
becomes a kind of currency itself In fact china's made
all kinds of noise about making their currency now and
oil standard upgrading from the old gold silver and bronze
medal of shame standard that western civilization well he used
to hold so dear petro dollars petro wealth were still
feeling it and weigh no that that makes this guy
Happy at least if you're happy and you know it 00:01:18.389 --> [endTime] never moved
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