A gas holder or gasholder, also known as a gasometer, is a large container in which natural gas or town gas (coal gas or formerly also water gas) is stored near atmospheric pressure at ambient temperatures. The volume of the container follows the quantity of stored gas, with pressure coming from the weight of a movable cap. Typical volumes for large gas holders are about 50,000 cubic metres (1,800,000 cu ft), with 60-metre-diameter (200 ft) structures.
Gas holders now tend to be used for balancing purposes to ensure that gas pipes can be operated within a safe range of pressures, rather than for actually storing gas for later use.
Antoine Lavoisier devised the first gas holder, which he called a gazomètre, to assist his work in pneumatic chemistry. [1] It enabled him to weigh the gas in a pneumatic trough with the precision he required. He published his Traité Élémentaire de Chimie in 1789. James Watt Junior collaborated with Thomas Beddoes in constructing the pneumatic apparatus, a short-lived piece of medical equipment that incorporated a gazomètre. Watt then adapted the gazomètre for coal gas storage. [2]
The anglicisation "gasometer" was adopted by William Murdoch, the inventor of gas lighting, in 1782, as the name for his gas holders. [3] [4] Murdoch's associates objected that his "gasometer" was not a meter but a container, but the name was retained and came into general use. Gas holders were marked as gasometers on the large-scale maps issued by the British Ordnance Survey and the term came to be used to label gas works, even though there may be several gas holders at any one gas works. However, the term "gasometer" is still discouraged for use in technical circles, where "gas holder" is preferred. [5]
The spelling "gas holder" is used by the BBC, among other institutions, but the variant "gasholder" is more commonly used.
Before the mid-20th century coal gas was produced in retorts by heating coal in the absence of air, the process being known as coal gasification. Coal gas was first used for municipal lighting, the gas being passed through wooden or metal pipes from the retort to the lantern. The first public piped gas supply was to thirteen gas lamps installed along the length of Pall Mall, London, in 1807. The credit for this installation goes to the German inventor and entrepreneur Frederick Albert Winsor. Digging up streets to lay pipes required easements, and this delayed both further installation of street lighting and the installation of gas for domestic illumination, heating and cooking.
Many people experimented with coal distillation to produce a flammable gas, including Jean Tardin (1618), Clayton (1684), Jean-Pierre Minckelers, Leuven (1785) and Pickel (D)(1786). William Murdoch was successful. He joined Boulton and Watt at the Soho manufactory in Birmingham in 1777, and in 1792 he built a retort to heat coal to produce the gas that illuminated his home and office in Redruth. His system lacked a storage method until James Watt Junior adapted a Lavoisier gazomètre for this purpose. A gasometer was incorporated into the first small gasworks built for the Soho manufactory in 1798. [6]
William Murdoch and his pupil Samuel Clegg went on to install retorts in individual factories and other workplaces. The earliest was in 1805, at Lee & Phillips, Salford Twist Mill, where eight gas holders were installed. [7] This was shortly followed by one in Sowerby Bridge, constructed by Clegg for Henry Lodge.
The first independent commercial gas works were built by the Gas Light and Coke Company in Great Peter Street, Westminster, in 1812, with wooden pipes laid to gas lights on Westminster Bridge on New Year's Eve in 1813. Public gas lights were seen as a means to reduce crime and until the 1840s they were regulated by police authorities. [8]
Because of safety concerns expressed by the Royal Society, the size of gas holders was limited to 6,000 cubic feet (170 m3) and they were enclosed in gasometer houses. In fact any small leak from an enclosed gas holder created a potentially explosive build-up of air and gas within the enclosing house, presenting a far greater danger than the original leak did; putting houses around gas holders was discontinued in the UK. In the United States, however, where gas needed to be protected from much more extreme weather, gasometer houses continued to be built and were architecturally decorative. [9]
The telescopic gas holder was first invented in 1824. The cup and dip (grip) seal was patented by Hutchinson in 1833, and the first working example was built in Leeds. Gas holders were then built all around the UK in great numbers starting in the 1850s. The first were the two-lift column-supported type; later ones had four lifts and were frame-guided, and they could be retrofitted with an additional flying lift. The large gas holders at Kings Cross, London, were built in the 1860s. [10]
William Gadd of Gadd & Mason in Manchester invented the spirally guided gas holder in 1890. Instead of external columns or guide frames, his design operated with spiral rails. The first commercial design was built in Northwich, Cheshire, in the same year. By the end of the 19th century most towns in Britain had their own gas works and gas holders. [10]
The years between the two world wars were marked by improvements in storage, especially the waterless gas holder, and in distribution, with the advent of 2-to-4-inch (50 to 100 mm) steel pipes to convey gas at up to 50 psi (340 kPa) as feeder mains to the traditional cast-iron pipes. Municipal gas works became superfluous in the later 20th century, but gas holders and production plants were still in use in steel works in 2016.[ citation needed ]
A gas holder provided storage for purified, metered gas. It acted as a buffer, removing the need for continuous gas production. The weight of the gas holder lift (cap) controlled the pressure of the gas in the mains and provided back pressure for the gas-making plant.
They are the only storage method that keeps gas at district pressure (the pressure required in local gas mains).
There are two basic types of gas holder: the water-sealed and the rigid waterless.
The water-sealed gas holder consists of a tank of water that rises and falls to take the gas. A watered gas holder consisted of two parts: a deep tank of water used to provide a seal, and a closed vessel (the lift) that rises above the water as the gas volume increased. [11]
Rigid waterless gas holders were a very early design that neither expanded or contracted. There are modern versions of the waterless gas holder, e.g. oil-sealed, grease-sealed and "dry seal" (membrane) types. They consist of a fixed cylinder capped by a moving piston. [12]
The earliest Boulton and Watt gas holders had a single lift. The tank was above ground and was lined with wood; the lift was guided by tripods and cables. Pulleys and weights were supplied to regulate the gas pressure. [13] Brick tanks were introduced in 1818, when a gas holder could have a capacity of 20,000 cubic feet (570 m3). The engineer John Malam devised a tank with a central rod-and-tube guide system.
Telescoping holders fall into two subcategories. The earlier of the telescoping variety were column-guided variations and were built starting in 1824. To guide the telescoping walls, or "lifts", they have an external frame, visible at a fixed height at all times. A refinement was the guide frame gas holder, where the heavy columns were replaced by a lighter and more extensive framework. Vertical girders (standards) were intersected by horizontal girders and cross-braced. This could be bolted onto an underground or above-ground tank. The Cutler patented guide frame dispensed with the horizontal girders, using diagonal triangulated framing instead. [14] Cable-guided gas holders, invented by Pease in 1880, had a limited use, but were useful on unstable ground where the rigid systems could buckle and jam the lift. [14]
Spiral-guided gas holders were built in the UK from 1890 until 1983. These have no frame, and each lift is guided by the one below, rotating as it goes up as dictated by helical runners. [15]
Both telescoping types use the manometric property of water to provide a seal. The whole tank floats in a circular or annular water reservoir, held up by the roughly constant pressure of a varying volume of gas, the pressure determined by the weight of the structure, and the water providing the seal for the gas within the moving walls. Besides storing the gas, the tank's design serves to establish the pressure of the gas system. With telescoping (multiple-lift) tanks, the innermost tank has an approximately 1 ft × 2 ft (30 cm × 61 cm) lip around the outside of the bottom edge, called a cup, which picks up water as it rises above the reservoir water level. This immediately engages a downward lip on the inner rim of the next outer lift, called a dip or grip, and as this grip sinks into the cup, it preserves the water seal as the inner tank continues to rise until the grip grounds on the cup, whereupon further injection of gas will start to raise that lift as well. Holders were built with as many as four lifts. [16] An extra flying lift could be retrofitted into column or frame gas holders. This was an additional inner tank that extended above the standards, when the infrastructure would support the extra shear forces and weight. Though not exclusively, spiral guides were used. [15]
Dry-seal gas holders have a static cylindrical shell, within which a piston rises and falls. As it moves, a grease seal, tar/oil seal or a sealing membrane which is rolled out and in from the piston keeps the gas from escaping. The MAN type (by Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg AG) was introduced in 1915: it was polygonal and used a tar/oil seal. The Klonne dry seal gas holder was circular and used a grease seal. The dry-seal Wiggins gasholder was patented in 1952: it used a flexible curtain that was suspended from the piston. [17] The largest low-pressure gas holder built was the Klonne gas holder built in 1938 in Gelsenkirchen. It was 147 metres (482 ft) high and 80 metres (260 ft) in diameter, which gave it a capacity of 594,000 cubic metres (21,000,000 cu ft). There was a MAN type, built in 1934 in Chicago with a capacity of 566,000 cubic metres (20,000,000 cu ft). [18]
The pollution associated with gasworks and gas storage makes the land difficult to reclaim for other purposes, but some gas holders, such as the Vienna Gasometers, have been converted into other uses such as living space and a shopping mall and historical archives for the city. Many sites, however, were never used for the production of 'town gas', so the land contamination is relatively low.
Gas holders have been a major part of the skylines of low-rise British cities for up to 200 years, due to their large distinctive shape and central location. They were originally used for balancing daily demand and generation of town gas. With the move to natural gas and construction of the national grid pipework, their use steadily diminished as the pipe network could both store gas under pressure, and eventually satisfy peak demand directly. [19] London, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Salisbury, and Glasgow (which has the largest gasometers in the UK [20] ) are noted for having many gas holders.
Some of these gas holders have become listed buildings. The gas holders behind King's Cross station in London were specially dismantled when the new Channel Tunnel Rail Link was being created, [21] with Gas holder No 8 being re-erected on a nearby site behind St Pancras station as part of a housing development. It has been fashioned into a park. [22] Most gas holders are no longer used, and a program of dismantling is underway to release the land for reuse. [19]
One of the largest remaining groups of gasholders is at Bromley-by-Bow in East London, believed to be the largest in Europe. [23]
A gasworks in South Lotts, Dublin, Ireland, was converted into apartments. [24]
In the past, holder stations would have an operator living on site controlling their movement. However, with the process control systems now used on these sites, such an operator is obsolete. The tallest gasometer in Europe is 117 metres (384 ft) tall and is located in Oberhausen. [25]
In the UK as well as other European countries, a movement to preserve classic gasometers has emerged in recent years, especially after Britain's National Grid announced in 2013 their plans to remove 76 gas holders, and soon afterwards, Southern and Scottish Gas networks announced that they would demolish 111 others. Christopher Costelloe, director of the Victorian Society, a leader in the campaign to preserve gasometers, has said that "Gasometers, by their very size and structure, cannot help but become landmarks. [They] are singularly dramatic structures for all their emptiness." [26]
The gasholder in Amsterdam has hosted the Awakenings Techno parties.
Gasometers are now comparatively rare in the US (where they were usually called gas holders); although hundreds were built between the 1870s and 1940s, many of those have since been demolished. The largest US-based builder of gas holders, the Baltimore-based Bartlett-Hayward Company (since 1927 a division of Koppers [28] ), built 600 of them from the 1870s up through 1941, when a monograph on the history of the company was published. [29] They were built in nearly every US state, [30] as well as elsewhere in North America, South America, and South Africa. [30] Those 600, of both water tank type (541 units) [30] and waterless type (59 units), [29] held a combined capacity of 1.1 billion cubic feet (10⁹). [31] Latrobe's chapters that deal with B.H.'s gas holder business line [32] provide additional details that are useful to readers interested in the US gas industry's history.
A general pattern of development in the US gas industry was that from the 1870s through the 1940s, gas manufacturing plants were common in many locales, producing both coal gas and water gas, [32] and in the second half of the 20th century, the rise of natural gas distribution via gas pipelines supplanted that system and the existing gas holders were used (in a less crucial capacity) for managing the pressure of the natural gas pipelines, until the holders reached the end of their useful lifespan.
Several gas holders were erected in St. Louis by the Laclede Gas Light Company in the early 20th century. These gasometers remained in use until the early first decade of the 21st century, when the last one was decommissioned and abandoned in place. The most recently used gasometer in the United States was on the southeast side of Indianapolis, but it has been demolished along with the adjoining Citizens Energy Group coke plant. Another pair of holders at the Newtown Holder Station, in Elmhurst, Queens, in New York City, was a popular landmark for traffic reporters until they were demolished in 1996 and became Elmhurst Park. The demolition of two larger "Maspeth Tanks" in nearby Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was described by The New York Times at length. [33]
Of the waterless type (MAN type), the first extremely large one by B.H. was the one at the River Rouge Plant of the Ford Motor Company, built in 1935. [29] Another large MAN-type gas holder was erected just east of Baltimore, Maryland, by B.H. in 1949 and operated by Baltimore Gas and Electric for 32 years. The 307-foot-tall (94 m), 170-foot-diameter (52 m) structure, which could hold 7 million cubic feet (200,000 m3), was a landmark due to its unusual marking scheme, which had a red-and-white checkerboard pattern from 200 feet (61 m) up. The structure was demolished in July 1984.[ citation needed ]
Approximately a dozen brick or concrete structures built in the latter half of the 19th-century to house gasholders, known as gasholder houses, still exist in the United States. The Troy Gas Light Company structure in Troy, New York, is one of the largest remaining examples. As of early 2021, efforts were under way to save the Concord Gas Light Company Gasholder House in Concord, New Hampshire. [34] It is unusual because the inner workings of the structure, including the cap, are still in place. [35] [36]
PG&E operated gas holders at its gasification plants in California before natural gas pipelines were built. The San Francisco Beach Street Plant was built in 1899. The gas plant operated until 1931, but its associated gas holder was used with natural gas into the 1950s, when the property was redeveloped. [37] Gas holders also previously existed at Chico (demolished 1951), [38] Daly City, [39] Eureka, [40] Fresno, [41] Long Beach(1927-1997), [42] Los Angeles, including two within sight of City Hall [43] Merced, [44] Monterey, [45] Oakland, [46] Redding (gas holder demolished early 1960s), [47] Redwood City (gas holder built early 1900s, demolished 1959), [48] Salinas, [49] San Francisco Potrero Plant, [50] Santa Rosa, [51] St. Helena, [52] Stockton, [53] Vallejo, [54] Willows; [55] and likely existed at their other gasification plants in Colusa, Hollister, Lodi, Madera, Marysville, Modesto, Napa, Oakdale, Oroville, Red Bluff, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Selma, Tracy, Turlock, Watsonville and Woodland. [56]
Gasholders, though once common, have become rare in Australia. Most gasworks within the country were demolished or repurposed, and few gasometers remain because of this. A good example of a largely intact gasometer is located at the Launceston Gasworks site in Tasmania. Though the gas bell has been removed, all other components are intact. The remains of two older 1860s gasometers are also visible on site but only the foundations remain. In Sydney a beautiful ornate gasometer frame can be seen from the platform of the Macdonaldtown railway station which was built above the access tunnels of the adjoining gasworks site.
In Queensland, the Gasworks Newstead is a commercial, residential, and retail development adjoining the river at Newstead, Brisbane, opening in 2013, built around a now heritage-listed 1887 gas holder. Only the frame remains, inside of which is a plaza used as a public recreation zone and for occasional special events such as markets or concerts. At dusk each day a dynamic lighting display illuminates the frame. The former industrial site on the inner-city fringe became an urban renewal zone for upmarket housing centred on the Gasworks zone.
For many years, a huge gasholder towered over the Arden Street Oval, the home ground of the North Melbourne Football Club in the Victorian Football League. Television coverage of Australian Rules football matches played at the famous ground showed the gasholder dominating the landscape. It was demolished in late 1977/early 1978.
This gasholder once operated by Gas del Estado is located in Villa Maipú, Partido de San Martín, Argentina. It was built in 1948 by MAN, and it was used to store coke gas produced by a near factory named Usina Corrales. With a total height of 85 metres (279 ft) and a diameter of 54 metres (177 ft), it was operational for short period of time until in 1954 it was decommissioned. The structure remains in place and it is property of Gas Natural Fenosa.
Most gas is stored in large underground reservoirs such as salt caverns. For short-term local storage, line-packing is the preferred method.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s it was thought that gas holders could be replaced with high-pressure bullets (a cylindrical pressure vessel with hemispherical ends). However, regulations brought in meant that all new bullets must be built several miles out of towns and cities, and the security of storing large amounts of high-pressure natural gas above ground made them unpopular with local people and councils. Bullets are gradually being decommissioned. It is also possible to store natural gas in liquid form, and this is widely practised throughout the world.
A gasworks or gas house is an industrial plant for the production of flammable gas. Many of these have been made redundant in the developed world by the use of natural gas, though they are still used for storage space.
Provan Gas Works is an industrial gas holding plant in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. The plant lies between the Blackhill, Blochairn, Germiston and Provanmill areas of the city, and was built by Glasgow Corporation between 1900 and 1904. It later became part of British Gas, and subsequently Transco and most recently Scotia Gas Networks who operate it today.
Beckton Gasworks was a major London gasworks built to manufacture coal gas and other products including coke from coal. It has been variously described as 'the largest such plant in the world' and 'the largest gas works in Europe'. It operated from 1870 to 1976, with an associated by-products works that operated from 1879 to 1970. The works were located on East Ham Level, on the north bank of the Thames at Gallions Reach, to the west of Barking Creek.
The Gas Light and Coke Company, was a company that made and supplied coal gas and coke. The headquarters of the company were located on Horseferry Road in Westminster, London. It is identified as the original company from which British Gas plc is descended.
Hanna, Donald and Wilson were a Scottish engineering and shipbuilding firm which flourished in the Victorian era.
The history of gaseous fuel, important for lighting, heating, and cooking purposes throughout most of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, began with the development of analytical and pneumatic chemistry in the 18th century. These "synthetic fuel gases" were made by gasification of combustible materials, usually coal, but also wood and oil, by heating them in enclosed ovens with an oxygen-poor atmosphere. The fuel gases generated were mixtures of many chemical substances, including hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and ethylene. Coal gas also contains significant quantities of unwanted sulfur and ammonia compounds, as well as heavy hydrocarbons, and must be purified before use.
The St Pancras Basin, also known as St Pancras Yacht Basin, is part of the Regent's Canal in the London Borough of Camden, England, slightly to the west of St Pancras Lock. Formerly known as the Midland Railway Basin,
The Troy Gas Light Company was a gas lighting company in Troy, New York, United States. The Troy Gasholder Building is one of only ten or so remaining examples of a type of building that was common in Northeastern urban areas during the 19th century. It was designed by Frederick A. Sabbaton, a prominent gas engineer in New York State. Originally sheltering a telescoping iron storage tank for coal gas, the brick gasholder house is an imposing structure from a significant period in the history of Troy. For twenty-seven years the company held a monopoly on the manufacture of illuminating gas in the city.
Østre Gasværk Teater is a theatre in the Østerbro district of Copenhagen, Denmark, located in an abandoned gasholder house of the former Østre Gasværk. The theatre is constructed within the masonry shell that used to house the gas holder, also known as a gasometer, proper. Built in 1883, it was one of the first independent works of Martin Nyrop, who would later become known for his design of the Copenhagen City Hall.
The East Greenwich Gas Works of the South Metropolitan Gas Company was the last gas works to be built in London, and the most modern. Originally manufacturing town gas from coal brought in by river and exporting coke and chemicals, the plant was adapted to produce gas from oil in the 1960s. Nothing remains of any of the gas holders; the last gas holder, built in 1886, was dismantled in 2020.
The Launceston Gasworks is a former industrial site located in the CBD of Launceston, Tasmania. The site was the principal supplier of gas to the City of Launceston before the importation of LPG in the 1970s. The gasworks produced gas by heating coal and siphoning off the gas that it released before refining and storing it on site in a set of 3, steel frame gasometers. The first buildings on site were the horizontal retort buildings built in 1860 from sandstone and local brick. The site was later used by Origin Energy as their Launceston LPG outlet. The site is instantly recognizable by its 1930s, steel braced, vertical retort building with the words "COOK WITH GAS" in the brickwork.
Southall Gas Works is a former gas works site of around 88 acres (36 ha) in Southall, west London, which is currently being redeveloped for mixed-use including 3,750 homes as part of Berkeley Group's The Green Quarter.
A gasholder house is a type of structure that was used to surround an iron gas holder, also known as a gasometer, in which coal gas was stored until it was needed. There are approximately a dozen of these structures—most constructed of brick in the latter-half of the 19th century—that still stand in the United States. Some examples still stand in Europe as well.
Gasworks Newstead is the commercial, residential and retail development at Newstead, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The upscale retail precinct includes restaurants, cafes, shops, a supermarket, and a public plaza inside the old gas holder of the heritage-listed Newstead Gasworks.
The Oval Gasholders is the unofficial name given to the gas holder (gasometer) located near The Oval cricket stadium in London, England. Construction began in 1853 and the site is officially called Kennington Holder Station by its owners, Southern Gas Network. It is a grade II listed building with the listed part of them known as Gasholder No. 1.
Newstead Gasworks is a heritage-listed former gasometer at 70 Longland Street, Teneriffe, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1873 to 1887. It is also known as Brisbane Gas Company Gasworks and Newstead Gasworks No.2 gasholder. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 24 June 2005.
West End Gasworks is a heritage-listed gasworks at 321 Montague Road, West End, Queensland, Australia. It is also known as South Brisbane Gas and Light Company Works. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 22 October 1999.
The Fitzroy Gasworks was a coal gasification plant in Fitzroy, Victoria. It is notable as the site for the first arc-welded gasholder in the world.
Edward Cockey (1781–1860) was an industrial entrepreneur in Frome, Somerset, England, descended from a local family of metalworkers.
The Windsor Street Gasworks was a coal gas and coke manufacturing site in Nechells, Birmingham. The works were constructed in 1846 for the Birmingham Gas Light and Coke Company adjacent to the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal to allow for the bulk import of coal. The company was taken over by the Birmingham Corporation in 1875 and under mayor Joseph Chamberlain and engineer Charles Hunt the Windsor Street site was expanded and connected to the London and North Western Railway. Hunt's works included the construction, in 1885, of gasholders No. 13 and No.14, the largest in the world at that time, as well as modernisation of production.
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