The week after New Year's is the quietest week the town has. The lights are still up on the houses off Rollingbrook but nobody is turning them on. The plastic bins come down from the attic and the ornaments go back in, and the tree goes out to the curb, and there is a kind of settling that happens, the same settling that happens in a house after company leaves. The kids have a few more days before school. The stores on Garth are full of people returning things. The credit-card bill has not come yet but everybody knows it is coming. It is cold in the mornings, or what passes for cold here, and the bay is that flat pewter color, and the town goes back to work without much ceremony because the plants never stopped and there is nothing to go back to that was not already running.
It is a good week for looking around a room. So look around the one you are in.
I do not know what room it is, but I can guess at most of what is in it. There is the screen you are reading this on, glass and metal on the outside and, underneath, a housing and a circuit board and a battery in a case, most of it plastic of one kind or another. There is a chair, and unless it is very old, the seat is a foam and the fabric is a synthetic and the frame is a molded polymer or a steel that was painted. There is paint on the walls. There is a floor, and if it is carpet the fibers are nylon or polyester, and if it is vinyl plank it is exactly what it says it is, and if it is wood there is a finish on it. There are wires in the wall with insulation on them. There is a window with a sealant around it. There may be a bottle of water. There may be a pen. There is almost certainly, somewhere in the room, a bag.
Every one of those things traces back to a barrel. Not all of one, not most of one. But a barrel is where they start, and I want to explain plainly what a barrel is, because the word is said out here a hundred times a day and almost nobody stops to picture it.
A barrel of oil is forty-two gallons. That is the whole definition, and it is a strange one. It is not a round number in any system. It is not the size of the drum you see behind a shop, which holds fifty-five. The forty-two comes from the wooden cask trade, from a size of barrel called a tierce that had been used for wine and for whale oil long before anybody drilled a well. When oil started coming out of the ground in Pennsylvania in the middle of the nineteenth century and men needed something to put it in, they used the casks they had, and the casks came in every size a cooper could make, and buyers and sellers argued. The story the oil historians tell is that in 1866 the producers agreed on the forty-two-gallon tierce, because a cask that size, full, was about as much as a man could roll and a wagon could carry. Forty-two gallons became the unit, and it has been the unit ever since, on every ticker and in every contract and on every report that comes out of every plant on the channel. Nobody has shipped oil in an actual barrel in any quantity for more than a century. It moves in pipelines and in the tanks of ships and in the enormous white cylinders you can see from the highway. The barrel is a ghost. It is a unit of measure named after a container that is no longer used, and the whole world's energy is counted in it.
So picture forty-two gallons. It is about the size of a large bathtub filled to the brim. It weighs about three hundred pounds. It is a dark, thick, unpleasant-smelling liquid that is, when you get right down to it, the remains of things that lived in a sea a very long time ago. Tiny organisms, mostly, plankton and algae, that took in sunlight and turned it into their bodies and then died and sank and were buried, and were cooked slowly under the weight of the rock above them for a span of time that is genuinely hard to hold in the mind. Hundreds of millions of years. What is in the barrel is sunlight. Old sunlight, stored in carbon and hydrogen, waiting.
The refinery's job is to take that one liquid and sort it into many. The way it does this is by heating it and letting it separate, because the different molecules in crude boil at different temperatures. Crude is not one substance. It is thousands of them, molecules of carbon and hydrogen of every length, from ones with a single carbon that would be a gas in your hand to ones with dozens that are nearly solid, and the short ones boil low and the long ones boil high. So the crude is heated in a furnace until most of it is vapor and sent into the bottom of a tall column, and the vapor rises, and as it rises it cools, and each kind of molecule condenses back to liquid at the height where the temperature matches its boiling point. The heaviest never rise at all. The lightest go all the way to the top. Between them, at every level, a pipe in the wall of the column draws off a different liquid. That is a distillation column: a sieve made of heat, sorting molecules by size.
Out of a barrel comes, very roughly, something like twenty gallons of gasoline, a dozen or so of diesel and heating oil, a few of jet fuel, and then smaller streams of other things: propane and butane, asphalt, lubricating oil, and the material the chemical plants are waiting for. The numbers move depending on the crude and the plant and what the market wants that month, so take them as a sketch. But that is the sketch. Most of the barrel becomes fuel. It becomes the thing in your tank and the thing in the truck that brought your groceries and the thing in the airplane overhead. A smaller part of the barrel, a modest share of it, becomes everything else.
That smaller part is what the room is made of.
Some of the lighter fractions from the barrel, and some natural gas liquids too, are sent to a cracker, which is a furnace that heats them to eight or nine hundred degrees and breaks the long molecules into short ones. The most important of the short ones is ethylene, two carbons and four hydrogens, the most-produced organic chemical in the world. Ethylene is the beginning of nearly everything. The two carbons in it are joined by a double bond, and a double bond is a kind of stored eagerness: it will open, given the right catalyst, and grab the next ethylene, and the next, until the molecules have joined hands by the thousands into a single chain. Link ethylene molecules together that way and you have polyethylene, which is the bag, the bottle, the film on the meat at the grocery store, the insulation on the wire in the wall. Take a related molecule, propylene, and chain it, and you have polypropylene, which is the chair frame and the container the leftovers went into. Go a few more steps down the chemistry, through other plants and other reactions, and you get the polyurethane foam in the seat cushion, the polycarbonate in the lens and the screen housing, the acrylic in the paint, the polyester in the carpet, the nylon in the rope. The names are long but the story is short: take the molecules apart, put them back together differently, and they become the objects of a life.
Baytown does this. The complex on the channel is one of the largest of its kind in the country and has a refinery, an olefins plant that makes ethylene, and a chemical plant that takes it further. Other plants nearby make other pieces of the chain. I am not going to tell you which pipe makes which thing, because I do not know it well enough to say and because it changes. But when I say the room traces back to a barrel, I do not mean a barrel somewhere in the abstract. I mean there is a reasonable chance that some fraction of the paint on your wall, or the foam under you, or the film around the food in your refrigerator, passed through a vessel that you can see from the pier at Bayland Park, and that a man or a woman on a night shift was watching the number on the screen that said it was going right.
I think the reason nobody pictures the barrel is that it has become the unit of civilization, and you do not picture the unit of anything. You do not picture an inch. You do not picture a kilowatt-hour. Somewhere around a hundred million barrels of oil are consumed in the world every day, give or take, and a number that large stops being a number and becomes weather. It is simply the condition under which everything else happens. But it is a good thing to do, once, in a quiet week, to bring it back down to the size of a bathtub and to say: this is the thing. This is the amount. Everything in this room began as some part of this amount, and the amount began as sunlight on a sea before there were people or trees or anything with a spine.
I do not say this to make anyone feel one way or the other about it. There are arguments to be had about the barrel and this town has them, at the kitchen table and at the council meetings and at the fence line, and I am not going to have them here. I only want the fact to be seen clearly, because it is seen clearly so rarely. The screen you are holding is a piece of the plant across the water, finished and shipped and sold and set down in your hand. The chair is a piece of the plant. The paint is a piece of the plant. Other towns live next to the source of things. This town is the source of things, and the things are everywhere, and they are so ordinary that they have become invisible, which is the highest compliment a made object can be paid.
Out on the bay this week there will be ships at anchor waiting for their turn at the docks. From the shore they look like buildings that have gotten loose. Some of them are carrying crude in, and some of them are carrying products out, and the larger of them hold the better part of a million barrels, which is to say the better part of a million of those bathtubs, which is to say a small sea of stored light. There is not one actual barrel on board any of them. There has not been for a long time. The barrel is a word we kept because we needed a way to count, and the counting goes on, in the control rooms and the trading rooms and the ledgers, forty-two gallons at a time, while the thing itself moves through the pipes in the dark and comes out the other side as a room.
