BP Buys Biggest Electric Car Network

The UK’s biggest electric car charging network has been bought by BP. This deal was done in a major oil producers sign agreement which also spoke the threat of low-carbon vehicles in their business. By the next year, there will be an installment of fast chargers at BP’s 1,200 forecourts. Earlier, around more than 6,500 charging points across the country have been acquired by the Chargemaster.

The deal is set to be of £130m and was also considered as a prominent milestone towards cleaner monitoring in the UK. Most of the electric vehicles on the UK’s road which is more than 140,000, are plug-in hybrid vehicles that are capable of covering short distances on its battery power before turning to petrol or diesel.

BP estimates that by 2040, the number of electric vehicles will hit 12m. However, the number is estimated at the much higher figure by other analysts.

The chief executive of BP’s downstream division- Tufan Erginbilgic said that BP would become an effective and leading supplier of energy to low-carbon vehicles in the UK. He further added that the entire world and the UK are in great need of ultra-fast charging to boost up the electric vehicles. This division consists of refineries and petrol stations.

He shared that this is not at all a defensive move by the company according to him. It was just that there were more profits as compared to other businesses, so the company got indulged into powering electric cars.

Erginbilgic told that BP has a focus on the UK market for electric car infrastructure than any other market and also its firm will deploy fast chargers in Germany later this year. The company added that around 450-600 miles of range per hour of charging would be added if BP Chargemaster would promise 150 kW charging. According to this, a car like Jaguar’s new I-Pace would add 100 miles in 10 minutes on its existing journey.

No doubt that we have upgraded charging points in our household, but charging a car at home takes up to six to twelve hours. BP’s chief executive- Bob Dudley said that after the Deepwater Horizon disaster and oil price fall, the company is in a proper right position to finance the things and start installing supporting greener energy. Moreover, the UK-based oil firm has vowed to contribute to low-carbon activities, that’s why the £130m paid for Chargemaster is a part of that $500m (£382m) contribution.

This is still a small part of the total $15-16bn that the company plans to spend in this year. In January, BP made a promise to invest $5m in the US firm Freewire Technologies, which is much smaller than the venture of electric car infrastructure. Shell, who is BP’s Anglo-Dutch rival made his first steps into the market last year and installed chargers on its forecourts. It also bought the Dutch firm New Motion that has 30,000 charging points in Europe.

Erginbilgic said upon asking that whether the company could be anticipated to make further steps into the electric car market that yes there will be more steps in this but not for the sake of investment, but for the growth. BNEF expects that by 2040, more than half of the UK Cars will become electric.

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