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East Greenwich Gas Works

From London's Ghost Acres

Revision as of 13:18, 25 August 2015 by Srl997 (Talk | contribs)



Operation

1886 to 1976


Location

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Located in

London


Produced

Coal Gas, Coal Tars


Used Raw Materials

Coal


|1886 |1949 |South Metropolitan Gas Company |-


|1949 |1980 |British Gas Corporation |-


|1886 |1960 |Coal Gas Industry |-


|1960 |1976 |Oil and Petroleum Industry |-

Description

Construction began in 1881 and ended in 1886. By the time it was complete, a previously greenfield marsh had been transformed into a modern coal gas works; supplying London with town gas for cooking, lighting, and heat. The East Greenwich Gas Works stretched for 2 kilometres along the Greenwich Peninsula and occupied some 240 acres. It featured an extensive internal railway to move coal, and two massive gas holders at the southern tip of the site. These gas holders at East Greenwich represented significant technological achievement in their day; the first to be built in 1886 was the first ever four-lift (moving section) gas holder in the world. While the second was significant simply because of it's massive size with a volume of 12,200,000 cubic feet, the largest in the world at the time; although it's capacity would be reduced to 8,900,000 cubic feet as a result of the 1917 Silvertown explosion. The plant continued to produce coal gas until the 1960s, when it began to produce gas from crude oil. This conversion to oil gasification greatly increased capacity, to the point that in 1965 400,000,000 cubic feet of gas was produced, more than any other single plant in the world. The introduction of North Sea gas in 1976 rendered oil gasification uneconomical, however, and the gas works were largely demolished over the next ten years.