Price of Liquids by the Barrel

The sort of people who complain about oil being $60 per barrel are often the sort who buy bottled water without a second thought.

For example. if you buy water by the case from Staples, you pay $6.59 for 24 half liter bottles, and folks will talk about what a great deal they got. But, there are just over 318 of those bottles in a 42 gallon barrel, which puts bottled water at $87.35 per barrel. The retail price would, of course, be much higher.

I posted about the absurdities of this a few days ago and linked to a post from Chase Me Ladies, I'm In the Cavalry that noted that HP Inkjet ink would cost just under $500,000.

I've got that beat.

Frequent commenter dearieme suggested I look into the cost of semen from bulls and stallions. I asked my vet about this, as well as Brian Gongol - who directed me to a number of sites like this one where bull semen can be purchased.

The standard unit of this is the straw. The cheapest straws run for around $12, good ones are in the $25-40 range, and they apparently run up to $200.

A straw is half a mililiter. A teaspoon is 5 mililters, and a (fluid) ounce is a bit less than 30. So, 60 or so straws to a (fluid) ounce makes even the cheapest bull semes more expensive than gold. There's probably a reason for that ... but I don't wanna' know.

Anyway, this site does conversions between units, and says that a barrel has 158,987 mililiters is it.

That puts the price of a barrel of bull semen at some $3,800,000 for the cheap stuff, $8-12 million for the good stuff, and just under $ 65 million for the cream of the crop.

Comments

[Big Mike (aka Half Sigma)]

So does that make bull semen more or less expensive than gold?

[Dave Tufte]

We'd have to get into the details of wet and dry measures, but my calculations are $700 per ounce for the cheapest bull semen.

My understanding is that the contents of straws are also concentrated - so I'm not sure there is a really good basis for comparison.

[JR]

Well you may want to update the site.. gold is running around $900 an ounce now. GO INFLATION!