The Global gashistorical Network

The Danish Gas Museum

By Hanne Thomsen, director

Denmark’s first gas museum was started in 1995 by the employees at Hovedstadsregionens Naturgas, the company with the biggest coal gasworks in the country, whose customers changed to natural gas from the mid-1980s.

In this connection the employees collected relevant objects to make an exhibition including objects from the archives of the coal gasworks.

The Gas Museum now has exhibitions about the use of coal gas in industry and in private homes, about bottled gas, which became widely used from the end of the 1940s, and about natural gas from the North Sea.

At the moment we are working on an exhibition in 2006/07 about piped gas, i.e. mainly the history of coal gasworks and natural gas. The museum is still collecting items, but it already has a fine collection concerning the production and the use of gas. It is just now quite easy to collect objects in connection with the conversion to natural gas, which is being carried out in parts of Copenhagen.

Danish gas history
The era of gas started relatively late in Denmark. The first coal gasworks was established in 1853, but Copenhagen, the capital, was not supplied with gas until 1857. Some 112 gasworks were built during the period until 1916.

When the first signs of crisis appeared for labour-intensive coal gas production in the 1950s, a move began to switch to the less demanding fission gas or propane gas.

As a consequence of rising oil prices after the oil crises in the 1970s these processes became too costly compared with other energy sources, and nearly all gasworks were shut down before the introduction of natural gas was decided upon.

The gasworks in Aalborg is an exception, and it and its predecessor have distributed gas – now natural gas mixed with air (town gas) – for 150 years.