Barrel per day

Barrel per day (abbreviated BPD, bbl/d, bpd, bd or b/d) is a measurement used to describe the amount of crude oil (measured in barrels) produced or consumed by an entity in one day. For example, an oil field might produce 100,000 bpd, and a country might consume 1 million bpd.

Note, BPD is not to be confused with BLPD which deals with the measurement of liquid instead of crude oil. These are slightly different amounts of volume.

According to BP "Statistical Review 2006":

* 1 barrel equals 42 US gallons
* 1 BPD = 42/24/60 = .0292 GPM
* 1 GPM = 34.29 BPD
* 1 barrel equals 158.984 Liters
* The approximate conversion for BPD to tonnes/year is 49.8, so 100,000 BPD equals around 4,980,000 tonnes per year.

Variations

Barrel per calendar day

Barrel per calendar day (bc/d or bcd) is a standard petroleum downstream industry measurement of actual refinery throughput, as opposed to designed capacity. BCD is computed by dividing the number of refined barrels of oil processed by the actual number of days the refinery was in operation.

ub units

In terms of production and consumption, it is common to use thousands barrels per day or million barrels per day. These are commonly written as mbd and mmbd respectively taking "m" as the Roman numeral for 1000. It is important not to confuse these with SI prefixes, where kbd and Mbd would mean a thousand and a million barrels per day respectively.

Qualifiers

A barrel can technically be used to specify any volume. Since the actual nature of the fluids being measured varies along the stream, sometimes qualifiers are used to clarify what is being specified. In the oil field, it is often important to differentiate between rates of production of fluids, which may be a mix of oil and water, and rates of production of the oil itself. If a well is producing 10mbd of fluids with a 20% water cut, then the well would also be said to be producing 8 thousand barrels of oil a day (mbod).

In other circumstances, it can be important to include gas in production and consumption figures. Normally, gas is measured in standard cubic feet, but when necessary, this volume is converted to a volume of oil of equivalent enthalpy of combustion. Production and consumption using this analogue is stated in barrels of oil equivalent per day (boed).

In the case of water injection wells, it is common to refer to the injectivity rate in barrels of water per day (bwd).