Yes, but one of the awesome properties of oil, that have made it such a great fuel, is that you can't normally get all that energy out of it in one huge burst.

Yes, but one of the awesome properties of oil, that have made it such a great fuel, is that you can't normally get all that energy out of it in one huge burst. One of the reasons is that the majority of that energy is not stored in the oil itself in some sense, it is stored in Oxygen in the air. There was recently a chemistry paper on this subject that contained exact numbers, but I haven't been able to find it again. Basically oil alone is not a great source of energy, oil+oxygen is; and it's very hard to get a mix of oxygen and thick crude oil.