Three minutes doesn’t seem like a long time, but at BHP, what we can deliver in three minutes to help improve the lives of millions of people around the world and drive economic growth is pretty impressive.

In 1973, a BHP employee had a great idea, figuring out what we could produce in three minutes, and then sharing their findings in our staff newsletter. Almost twenty years later, in 1992, we repeated the work and saw just how much the company had grown.

Now in 2018, 45 years since the original article, we’re at it again – and there are some pretty big changes.

From making enough oil to create 27,000 crayons, to producing enough copper to wire a Boeing 747, what we can do in three minutes is both astonishing and interesting.

Our examples are illustrative only and may not represent actual or exact production rates. The examples are based on the production numbers in our Operational Review for the year ended 30 June 2017 (FY2017 production) and were calculated by averaging our FY2017 production over FY2017 on a per minute basis. 

You can read the original articles in ‘Our history’ or more about what we can now do in three minutes (PDF 4.6 mb)