Barrel (unit) continued to use the same size barrels. In the worldwide oil industry, an oil barrel is defined as 42 US gallons, which is about litres or 35 imperial gallons. Oil companies that are listed on American stock exchanges typically report their production in terms of volume and use the units of bbl, Mbbl (one thousand barrels), or MMbbl (one million barrels) and occasionally for widest comprehensive statistics the Gbbl (or sometimes Gbl) denoting a billion. There is a conflict concerning the units for oil barrels (see ). For all other physical quantities, according to the International System of Units, the
History of the petroleum industry in Canada (oil sands and heavy oil) production in 1978, exactly two centuries after Peter Pond's first sighting of the oil sands. But before the plant shipped its first barrel of oil, the project went through many trials. The reason for the long gap between approval and completion was an alarming escalation of costs that beset all major North American projects in the 1970s. High inflation multiplied budgets for practically every aspect of the Syncrude project. Reviewing project costs in late 1973, the Syncrude consortium found that costs had more than doubled, from $1 billion to $2.3 billion. In December 1974, Atlantic Richfield (whose American parent needed