When you turn oil into fuel, it makes more sense.

A barrel contains 159 liters of crude oil, or 42 gallons.

To use this oil, it must be refined. The refining process produces a variety of products, including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and many household products such as cleaning products, plastics and even lotions.

Once refined, one barrel typically produces about 73 liters (or 19.35 gallons) of gasoline, which powers cars and trucks.

A pickup truck can travel 24 miles on 1 gallon of gasoline, 100 kilometers on 10 liters of gasoline, and approximately 730 kilometers or 450 miles on a barrel of oil.

In other words, one barrel of crude oil can fuel a trip from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio.

Now let’s expand this to national consumption in the United States. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States has approximately 285 million motor vehicles that consume nearly 9 million barrels of gasoline every day.

If all of Venezuela’s crude oil were refined into gasoline, it could supply U.S. cars for about 40 years at today’s consumption rates.