3 More Facts About BP plc

I’m sure dedicated shareholders of BP (LSE: BP) (NYSE: BP.US) will know all about the bank’s financials, prospects and valuation.

But large, established companies such as BP often come with many interesting stories from years gone by. I’ve trawled the Internet and discovered these fun facts you probably never knew about the FTSE 100 member:

Awesome Power

In order to stay as a front-runner in searching for new sources of oil and gas, BP continues to invest in its supercomputer based in Houston, Texas.    

This is used to process the vast amounts of data that the seismic exploration teams produce, and has the unbelievable capacity of more than one petaflop.  This means it can runover a thousand trillion floating point calculations per second.

BP at the forefront of Biofuel research

In July 2013, BP (in a joint venture with AB Sugar and DuPont) opened the UK’s largest Bio-refinery in Hull.   

The Vivergo plant will produce 420 million litres of bioethanol a year when it finally gets up to full capacity.  This is equivalent to a third of the UK’s current demand. Bioethanol is a renewable transport fuel which is added to petrol. 

Always the Innovators

As you would have probably guessed, BP is often the first to develop new drilling and mining techniques.  But what might not be so obvious is the somewhat tiny tweaks they make to existing methods that go on to provide a real difference. 

For example, water has always been used to flush out trapped oil in rocks.  However, BP developed (and subsequently now own outright) a slight variation on this, which has resulted in being able to harvest 40% more.  This ground breaking discovery?  Using water with a slightly lower salt content.  It really is the little things.