Fun fact!  MMbbl and Mbbl can mean the same thing.

Our writing team was recently working on a whitepaper and needed to pull some statistics about oil production volume.

We noticed that, in some of the sources we used, “Mbbl” was used to represent thousands of barrels.

In others, “Mbbl” referred to millions of barrels.

In still others, millions of barrels was written as “MMbbl.”

We had to do a bit of cross-referencing and fact-checking to make sure we knew what we were reading (and writing).

The takeaway?

Don’t assume that “Mbbl” means 1,000 barrels or “MMbbl” means 1 million barrels or that you’ll see these abbreviations used consistently across different publications or industries.

If you’re not sure, take the time to verify.

And, just for fun, here’s something we stumbled across as we tried to unravel the whole Mbbl vs. MMbbl conundrum:

Some people say that the origin of the abbreviation “bbl” for “barrels” dates back to the late 1860s, when U.S. oil producers decided that 42 gallons should be the standard volume for oil barrels.

When Standard Oil started making the 42-gallon barrels, they made them in one color: blue.

Eventually, “blue barrel” — or “bbl” — became synonymous with 42-gallon oil barrels.