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
Barrel (unit) tankers. In the United States, the 42-US-gallon size of barrel as a unit of measure is largely confined to the oil industry, while different sizes of barrel are used in other industries. Nearly all other countries use the metric system. The abbreviations Mbbl and MMbbl refer to one thousand and one million barrels, respectively. These are derived from the Latin "mille" meaning "thousand". This is different from the SI convention where "M" stands for the Greek "mega", meaning "million". Outside of the oil industry, the unit Mbbl (megabarrel) can sometimes stand for one million barrels. The "b" may have been