How big?

This morning a oil terminal outside of London blew up. The paper says the terminal handles “2.37 million metric tonnes of petrol and other oil products a year”.

How much is that? It’s about 19 million bbl/year (if I assume 8 barrels/ton (see here). or 51 thousand bbl/day. For comparison the Gulf of Mexico has about 500,000 barrels a day shutin right now. So it’s about a tenth the impact of that. That sounds big.

Let’s try another approach. The bottom of this page it says that on average a thousand people consume 31 barrels of oil/day, but scanning the table suggests that Britain probably consumes something more like 35 or 40. So, using the 31 bbl/day, that terminal handled the oil for 1.4 million people. London’s population is 7.4 million, England and Wales is 54 million.

I gather that this terminal had a pipeline to Heathrow airport, but I haven’t found how much fuel the airport consumes per day.

1 thought on “How big?

  1. Pier

    How big? Big… We live nearly 30 km (20 mi) away from Hemel Hempstead and were woken up at 6 AM by the explosion… For a “kaboom” to be heard 30 kilometers away, with trees, bushes, hills, and one third of London’s finest victorian buildings in between, it’s got to be REALLY big…

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