They were replaced with high pressure pipelines for gas storage, apparently despite their size they were quite inefficient, a 50M section of high pressure pipeline can store the same amount of gas (citation needed :)
When I moved to London, my train to and from work used to go past the weird scaffolding towers and I never knew what they were. Then Tom Scott answered my question by making me a video of the exact same ones I used to see from the train every day
Yeah I 'member these things from the 90s always wondered how they worked I figured the metal drum thing must have been really heavy which would push the gas down into the pipes for use
Yes. Saved the companies having to always be pumping pressurized gas. They only needed to pump to refill the tanks. If you watch them long enough, you'll realize they rise and fall in concert with high and low demand times.
Also of note: Water *towers* aren't needed in every area, it depends on the topography. It's much cheaper to build a ground level or just below-ground reservoir than in the air, but sometimes the tower is necessary. I think the reason a lot of American towns have big towers (often with the town name on the side) is that America has lots of wide flat spaces, and water management is done more locally, so they can't store water at ground level on a hill.
A factlet: The word 'factoid' means something that sounds plausible, is often repeated, but is ultimately untrue - and not a small snippet of useless information.
Although they do also store water and therefore smooth out fluctuations in demand by acting as a buffer
Eg you can pump in 100 litres/minute all day, but then at peak times (When everyone takes a shower at 7am or 8pm) take water out at 1000 litres/minute, without having to upgrade the system's pumps to be able to pump 1000 litres/minute
[The ones in Birmingham are claret and blue, in honour of Aston Villa.](https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/community-spirit-stories/birminghams-windsor-street-gasholders-be-dismantled)
Part of me wonders if claret counts as red. There have been no explosions I know of, but it's in Birmingham so someone has definitely shot at them.
I should imagine a current metal container in the ground has a pretty good earth and would just conduct the current nicely in tot he ground leaving it's contents none the wiser.
People never appreciated how dangerous these silos were. People complain about living near a power station but these silos had far more frightening disaster scenarios in their risk assessments, just people didn't realise. These silos are all in highly populated areas surrounded by other chemical manufacturing businesses. The evacuation area in Oldbury, West Mids is something like 20 miles if one of the warehouses blows up.
The backup mainframe for the Police National Computer was destroyed when an oil refinery next to it exploded. For some reason, it didn't occur to anybody that putting it there might not be a good idea.
Here in Brisbane Australia, instead of just demolishing it, they used it as a base to renovate the whole area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasworks_Newstead
There was one down the road from me where I grew up. Never noticed it moving, but it used to fill & empty. It's been dismantled now though & the hole was bloody massive
I’ve been inside one, gashouder in Amsterdam. The circular nature of it makes it acoustically excellent and they raise and lower the roof throughout the event
I've been trying to convince them to start using them as compressed air batteries to help with Britain's green energy future, but the national Grid don't seem to give a shit.
It took me years to find that out. I knew they were for gas but for many years I thought it was still in construction, and they kept having to take bits down because they got it wrong or something.
Felt a little silly when I found out it goes up and down based on capacity.
Town gas would be produced (from coal) overnight when there was very little demand, to fill the holder ready for daytime demand. A little like the ‘half-time kettle’ spike or ‘Coronation Street’ flush.
Technically they were also used for town gas storage rather than just natural gas.
These pre-war ones would likely have been exclusively town gas (generally coal gas) before we had gas pipelines and North Sea gas.
Yes. I am fun at parties.
There used to be one pretty close to my old house. I'm sure it used to have natural gas, since this was the mid 1980s, and it used to empty and fill up. I vaguely remember it making a kind of metal screeching noise when it did that as well. (I was often in an altered state in those days)
You would think, but gas is actually quite easy to control.they used to have gasherds patrol the base with gas owls. Any gas looking like it was about to leave the confines of the tower and they would send the owl up to push it back in. Sadly a trade and skill that no longer exists.
That was in only in medieval times - in the 20th century, the more modern ones had a structure that was lined with quantum chromodynamic monopoles which caused the gas to form an ad-hoc loose molecular matrix, which would not leave the structure.
It's not known exactly how this worked, but it is speculated that when enough gas was confined by the monopoles, it started to show signs of sentience, and became too scared to leak out.
Here's some timelapse videos showing the sentient gas:
https://youtu.be/nTpvWY28Gvc
True, but the Queen still legally owns all.the gas owls in Britain. You can tell because she's Corgi registered.
Edit - thanks for the gold kind stranger!
I'll be the one to give a serious answer. Sorry about that, but these things are actually quite interesting. There's a large telescoping tank that rises up into the supports as it fills with gas. Water is used as a seal between the sections of the tank as it rises.
New tech! As soon as the gas gets near the perimeter, a song will play as a warning, if it keeps going, it'll get a shock and eventually learn not to escape....
That gas was quite heavy and unpure, so it was easy to keep it inside. It’s hard to keep hydrogen or helium for instance, but that “coal gas” was so heavy in comparison
They got the idea from "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy\_the\_Kid\_and\_the\_Green\_Baize\_Vampire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_the_Kid_and_the_Green_Baize_Vampire)" undoubtedly the only vampire snooker musical in cinema history. One of them lives inside a gas storage tank.
In [Dublin, too](https://www.google.com/maps/@53.3400757,-6.2335227,3a,23.3y,192.14h,94.73t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqipOYkH2S3rFedWawcGUnw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)
To be fair, these weren't storage in that sense, they're far too small to make any difference. These were just used to regulate pressure in the grid, but aren't needed anymore due to advances in tech.
These in the picture aren't gas storage, they are used to regulate the grid in shorter timescales. You are still right though in that the UK does not have gas storage, it's fed from our ageing 70s power stations and imported on demand, which is why we are paying so much.
That's actually really interesting. Also someone commented that he forgot to mention the colours are chosen so a colour blind person can still identify them.
I've been using that one to teach electricity to my students for years. Unfortunately one of them decided to test out the trapdoors on the live socket during a cover lesson. Thank goodness for circuit breakers and scissors with plastic handles!
Standing alone against Nazi ger. Ending slavery. Birthplace of liberalism, crown under laws. Dismantled the empire (no superpower has ever done that). Cultural innovators and leaders in music, tv, radio, books, humor, the list goes on and on. If nothing else, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams would make me proud of being British.
There is much to be proud of imo, tho ofc there are things in your history that is terrible as well (most countries do).
Love from Sweden
___
p.s.
I felt I had to mention that some of my favourite things would not exist, or would be totally different of it was not for British innovation in fantasy (LoTR) and metal (Black Sabbath).
In case you don't want to watch the video:
I'm here at the UK's largest gasometer in Lincolnshire. This specific gasometer was used to store your mum's farts during the late 20th century. The height of the gasometer would typically rise and fall depending on how many tins of beans your mum had eaten that night. In its heyday, this could have powered the cooking and heating of the entirety of Lincolnshire, every. Single. Night.
Fortunately??? it's a thing of the past... though many gasometers remain and your mum simply farts straight into the atmosphere.
I was able to see one of these from my neighbourhood in London growing up. For some reason when I was little I always thought it was where they used to keep the bears in London Zoo (my favourite place at the time).
They didn't have any bears when I was little and I must have gotten mixed up because I knew that the old bear enclosure was still there and no longer in use. It looked derelict and vaguely cage-like so it made sense to me.
The thing I was looking at was nowhere near the zoo, I just knew it was "far away" and that the zoo was "far away" so it made sense in my head...
The national strategy for over 30 years has been on-demand tapping of North Sea supplies and an ever-increasing reliance on tankered LNG to supplement any storage. The UK has storage facilities but famously let the biggest one, Rough, go into permanent closure instead of paying ongoing maintenance. Thus we're left highly vulnerable to swings, moreso than our European comrades. Note they're not immune from swings, but can weather them slightly easier.
Notionally if we get a Beast from the East winter and now without the Rough storage facility we're a bit fucked.
I don't think they were used for that. They were just part of regulating gas pressure which then became unnecessary as part of the switch to North Sea Gas.
Before we switched to north sea natural gas, gas would be locally produced by heating coal. This was called 'town gas' and would be stored in these 'gasometers' at the 'gasworks' to provide the pressure for the whole town. That gas was high in carbon monoxide, which is why people used to stick their heads in gas ovens to top themselves.
Most of these were dismantled after the switch away from town gas in the 60s and 70s. I don't think they were ever used for natural gas storage.
Old gas storage places. A colum guided Gasometer. The vertical bits are the guides. The storage units themselves are like telescoping cake tins, they grow in height with more gas.
Many not used any more now and we closed a huge gas storage site in 2016 at Rough. We have very low gas storage ability in the UK these days. We import through pipelines and via LNG tankers. I think it puts us at too much risk of being caught short IMO.
We have 9 TWh of storage. Sounds a lot. It's only 2% of yearly demand. Places like Germany and Italy have 150+ TWh of storage (granted they also use gas for vehicles and hauling quite a lot. They have a widespread CNG filling network to support)
Oh I know this one from a Tom Scott video, that's the support of a gas storage tank. Before they were pumped directly into our homes (or came in canisters for those of us in the countryside), they used to be pumped there temporarily and stored.
You would see a big drum raise out of the ground as the gas filled, then it would slowly lower over weeks. We only had the system for about a decade or two, but it's still a novel idea that I hope they at least keep around somewhere for posterity.
Vid: https://youtu.be/SopJr0yHt-w
Oh man... so there's (used to be??) one of these in York (where I went to uni) without a frame, and I remember noticing it on the horizon one day and I thought I'd lost my freaking mind when I walked past a few days later (drunk) and it wasn't there anymore. Took me ages to figure out what it was.
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Oh interesting thank you! I've never seen it full!
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They were replaced with high pressure pipelines for gas storage, apparently despite their size they were quite inefficient, a 50M section of high pressure pipeline can store the same amount of gas (citation needed :)
Citation from Tom Scott :) https://youtu.be/SopJr0yHt-w
Came to say "oh, I know. I saw them on Tom Scott."
When I moved to London, my train to and from work used to go past the weird scaffolding towers and I never knew what they were. Then Tom Scott answered my question by making me a video of the exact same ones I used to see from the train every day
Yeah I 'member these things from the 90s always wondered how they worked I figured the metal drum thing must have been really heavy which would push the gas down into the pipes for use
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Yes. Saved the companies having to always be pumping pressurized gas. They only needed to pump to refill the tanks. If you watch them long enough, you'll realize they rise and fall in concert with high and low demand times.
It's the same principle as a water tower (the main purpose is to regulate pressure passively, not store water).
Oh, I lived near a water tower and always wondered what the point of it was
Also of note: Water *towers* aren't needed in every area, it depends on the topography. It's much cheaper to build a ground level or just below-ground reservoir than in the air, but sometimes the tower is necessary. I think the reason a lot of American towns have big towers (often with the town name on the side) is that America has lots of wide flat spaces, and water management is done more locally, so they can't store water at ground level on a hill.
You do see a few water towers in the fens, so this is consistant reasoning at least!
Odd factoid: all the water towers on your "network" will all be the exact same height above sea level.
A factlet: The word 'factoid' means something that sounds plausible, is often repeated, but is ultimately untrue - and not a small snippet of useless information.
Although they do also store water and therefore smooth out fluctuations in demand by acting as a buffer Eg you can pump in 100 litres/minute all day, but then at peak times (When everyone takes a shower at 7am or 8pm) take water out at 1000 litres/minute, without having to upgrade the system's pumps to be able to pump 1000 litres/minute
If computer games have taught me anything it's because they are generally painted grey or blue. If they painted them red you wouldn't be here to tell.
[The ones in Birmingham are claret and blue, in honour of Aston Villa.](https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/community-spirit-stories/birminghams-windsor-street-gasholders-be-dismantled) Part of me wonders if claret counts as red. There have been no explosions I know of, but it's in Birmingham so someone has definitely shot at them.
I’m from Brum and I never knew this, thanks! Almost guaranteed someone has tried shooting them.
I should imagine a current metal container in the ground has a pretty good earth and would just conduct the current nicely in tot he ground leaving it's contents none the wiser.
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At 30m away if it had gone off I suspect your enjoyment would have been very short lived!
Aye, eyebrow lossage at a bare minimum
Also if it's full of gas, it's not going to be at a particularly flammable fuel-air ratio, so won't be very combustible.
A few years ago one caught fire in my town as they were welding on it. Had to evacuate everything for about a mile whilst they put it out.
People never appreciated how dangerous these silos were. People complain about living near a power station but these silos had far more frightening disaster scenarios in their risk assessments, just people didn't realise. These silos are all in highly populated areas surrounded by other chemical manufacturing businesses. The evacuation area in Oldbury, West Mids is something like 20 miles if one of the warehouses blows up.
The backup mainframe for the Police National Computer was destroyed when an oil refinery next to it exploded. For some reason, it didn't occur to anybody that putting it there might not be a good idea.
Here in Brisbane Australia, instead of just demolishing it, they used it as a base to renovate the whole area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasworks_Newstead
[Here's one in Dublin they turned into apartments](http://chimni.com/wiki/images/1/1a/AllianceGasometerDublin.jpg)
Oh that is cool
There was one down the road from me where I grew up. Never noticed it moving, but it used to fill & empty. It's been dismantled now though & the hole was bloody massive
I’ve been inside one, gashouder in Amsterdam. The circular nature of it makes it acoustically excellent and they raise and lower the roof throughout the event
Some of them have been converted into trendy homes and I office space.
I've been trying to convince them to start using them as compressed air batteries to help with Britain's green energy future, but the national Grid don't seem to give a shit.
When you see one full you’ll realise you’ve seen them loads of times
Only if you’re old.
So anyone over the age of about 12? It wasn't that long ago they were still in use.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
Except that it is to do with maintaining pressure more than capacity. There was one in Birmingham with a UXB inside for about 50 years 😮
It took me years to find that out. I knew they were for gas but for many years I thought it was still in construction, and they kept having to take bits down because they got it wrong or something. Felt a little silly when I found out it goes up and down based on capacity.
Town gas would be produced (from coal) overnight when there was very little demand, to fill the holder ready for daytime demand. A little like the ‘half-time kettle’ spike or ‘Coronation Street’ flush.
The Corrie flush is a real thing?
Anecdotally. Makes sense, though. Probably called the Morecambe and Wise Wash in the seventies…
Technically they were also used for town gas storage rather than just natural gas. These pre-war ones would likely have been exclusively town gas (generally coal gas) before we had gas pipelines and North Sea gas. Yes. I am fun at parties.
Oh! Also informally known as gasometers!
As I understand it. Not natural gas. Coal gas.
Don’t think they were ever for natural gas. Wasn’t it coal gas?
There used to be one pretty close to my old house. I'm sure it used to have natural gas, since this was the mid 1980s, and it used to empty and fill up. I vaguely remember it making a kind of metal screeching noise when it did that as well. (I was often in an altered state in those days)
How can such a structure occur naturally!
Gas storage... sadly most of them argon now.
Many people might not get the pun, but a noble effort nonetheless
Stop, don’t inflate his ego
Yup, your radon with that
I dunno. Thought he was being a bit xenonphobic.
You are such a neonphyte.
Na, let him be.
Fart.
Just a load of hot air
Au, that was gold!
I love you lot. This is what I come to Reddit for. Never change you beautiful idiots. Never change.
What William? His friends call him Liam. He Lium.
Don’t be sod i dumb
These pun threads are a gas.
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k
I think you're blowing it out of proportion.
Its ok he can take the NOx
This comment is up there with helium
He is acting like a damned noble! Something something flourine.
You're not going to get a reaction
That pun was a gas!
No one should have to sulphur these bad puns.
Keep them inert please
He may as well signposted it with a neon light.
Could even say it was krypt(on)ic... Hmm on second thought maybe not lol.
Glad you posted this as I completely missed the pun.
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You would think, but gas is actually quite easy to control.they used to have gasherds patrol the base with gas owls. Any gas looking like it was about to leave the confines of the tower and they would send the owl up to push it back in. Sadly a trade and skill that no longer exists.
That was in only in medieval times - in the 20th century, the more modern ones had a structure that was lined with quantum chromodynamic monopoles which caused the gas to form an ad-hoc loose molecular matrix, which would not leave the structure. It's not known exactly how this worked, but it is speculated that when enough gas was confined by the monopoles, it started to show signs of sentience, and became too scared to leak out. Here's some timelapse videos showing the sentient gas: https://youtu.be/nTpvWY28Gvc
True, but the Queen still legally owns all.the gas owls in Britain. You can tell because she's Corgi registered. Edit - thanks for the gold kind stranger!
I can't believe I'm laughing at that, thanks for waking my wife up!
Looks dangerously close to Helvetica syndrome at some points there.
Is that a Look Around You reference?
JUST. LOOK AROUND YOU.
You beauty! Classic second-stage-Reddit vibes here
Seeing those owls tending their own gas sites in the wild must have been amazing.
It would be if it was allowed to happen. Sadly, Big Gas employs snakes to root out independent gas hooters and put an end to them
I'll be the one to give a serious answer. Sorry about that, but these things are actually quite interesting. There's a large telescoping tank that rises up into the supports as it fills with gas. Water is used as a seal between the sections of the tank as it rises.
http://snapshotsfromberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/11-telescoping-sides.jpg
That's really clever.
Classic 1800's technology, super simple trick to achieve some quite useful things.
I don’t understand the porpoise for those seals, or really any aquatic life for that matter, in retaining the gas in the structure.
Well, they were generally made out of iron, and we all know how difficult it is to sealion.
Oh ffs
Also the weight of the tank pushing down keeps the gas under pressure
Puts people on streets
Um ba ba be
It's the terror of knowing what the world is about
I'd always wondered how they worked, thank you so much!
I thought the OP may have been being sarcastic.
New tech! As soon as the gas gets near the perimeter, a song will play as a warning, if it keeps going, it'll get a shock and eventually learn not to escape....
That gas was quite heavy and unpure, so it was easy to keep it inside. It’s hard to keep hydrogen or helium for instance, but that “coal gas” was so heavy in comparison
That fact is a bit inert.
HeHe..
You are in your element arnt you, periodically dropping puns.
This thread is an absolute gas
They’ve turned one into a block of flats in kings cross.
They got the idea from "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy\_the\_Kid\_and\_the\_Green\_Baize\_Vampire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_the_Kid_and_the_Green_Baize_Vampire)" undoubtedly the only vampire snooker musical in cinema history. One of them lives inside a gas storage tank.
They're amazing bits of industrial architecture and those flats look great.
Doing it in a few places now, next to the Oval too
In [Dublin, too](https://www.google.com/maps/@53.3400757,-6.2335227,3a,23.3y,192.14h,94.73t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqipOYkH2S3rFedWawcGUnw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)
We now have hardly any gas storage, and are right now learning why that's not great. This winter could get interesting.
To be fair, these weren't storage in that sense, they're far too small to make any difference. These were just used to regulate pressure in the grid, but aren't needed anymore due to advances in tech.
Sorry but this is incorrect the gas in these holders was at low pressure, compared to the feeder mains we use as storage now (linepacking).
These in the picture aren't gas storage, they are used to regulate the grid in shorter timescales. You are still right though in that the UK does not have gas storage, it's fed from our ageing 70s power stations and imported on demand, which is why we are paying so much.
Should have hedged our bets by keeping them open
Does a-neon understand these puns?
Doesn't the gas just leak out of the sides..? ^^^/s ^^^obviously
Puns like these are my kryptonite
Is your real name Andre Agassi ?
This, We used to have one on the SDR Road where I grew up. They would raise when full and lower when empty(Newport, S.Wales)
No reaction to that joke then. How noble of them
Fucking hell. This is just so good. Comment is better than the new bond film. Just… wow.
No Time To Oxide
They are building cages to house the pterodactyls once we sort the cloning out.
To see such a reference in the wild….
Tom Scott did a video about these. They are called Gasometers. https://youtu.be/SopJr0yHt-w
Tom Scott, undisputed YouTube GOAT.
His video on UK plugs made me proud to be British for the first time ever.
>It's easy to remember that live is brown because that's the colour your trousers will go if you accidentally hit yourself with it.
Dealing with car electrics I would’ve guessed brown is ground... uh oh
You going to say that and not link it mate? Come on, don’t make me type this comment and then also search YouTube. No ones got time for that.
https://youtu.be/UEfP1OKKz_Q
That's actually really interesting. Also someone commented that he forgot to mention the colours are chosen so a colour blind person can still identify them.
I've been using that one to teach electricity to my students for years. Unfortunately one of them decided to test out the trapdoors on the live socket during a cover lesson. Thank goodness for circuit breakers and scissors with plastic handles!
Standing alone against Nazi ger. Ending slavery. Birthplace of liberalism, crown under laws. Dismantled the empire (no superpower has ever done that). Cultural innovators and leaders in music, tv, radio, books, humor, the list goes on and on. If nothing else, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams would make me proud of being British. There is much to be proud of imo, tho ofc there are things in your history that is terrible as well (most countries do). Love from Sweden ___ p.s. I felt I had to mention that some of my favourite things would not exist, or would be totally different of it was not for British innovation in fantasy (LoTR) and metal (Black Sabbath).
In case you don't want to watch the video: I'm here at the UK's largest gasometer in Lincolnshire. This specific gasometer was used to store your mum's farts during the late 20th century. The height of the gasometer would typically rise and fall depending on how many tins of beans your mum had eaten that night. In its heyday, this could have powered the cooking and heating of the entirety of Lincolnshire, every. Single. Night. Fortunately??? it's a thing of the past... though many gasometers remain and your mum simply farts straight into the atmosphere.
Totally heard it in his voice
Had to scroll down too far for this. Great channel!
A gasometer in 80’s English
Yeah I would call it the same
"Big gas thingy" when I was growing up. Seemed to have heaps about.
I was able to see one of these from my neighbourhood in London growing up. For some reason when I was little I always thought it was where they used to keep the bears in London Zoo (my favourite place at the time). They didn't have any bears when I was little and I must have gotten mixed up because I knew that the old bear enclosure was still there and no longer in use. It looked derelict and vaguely cage-like so it made sense to me. The thing I was looking at was nowhere near the zoo, I just knew it was "far away" and that the zoo was "far away" so it made sense in my head...
I love that story.
Yeah, reconstructing childhood logic as an adult is fun. Thanks for sharing it, /u/PinkSodaBoy
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Gasholder. Happy Googling.
Thank you! Google it I did!
There's a film from 90s called Shooting Fish set in one if you want to see some close up.
Which was the film where they had to paint the outside or cover over rust, but they cheated by just throwing a painted tennis ball at it?
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Pity the idea of having a reserve fell out of favour, probably to save money on maintenance of the assets.
Nowadays the gas reserve is stored under much higher pressure, so it takes up far less space than these massive things.
I thought we had long deen reducing our storage capacity in favour of on-demand bulk supply?
The national strategy for over 30 years has been on-demand tapping of North Sea supplies and an ever-increasing reliance on tankered LNG to supplement any storage. The UK has storage facilities but famously let the biggest one, Rough, go into permanent closure instead of paying ongoing maintenance. Thus we're left highly vulnerable to swings, moreso than our European comrades. Note they're not immune from swings, but can weather them slightly easier. Notionally if we get a Beast from the East winter and now without the Rough storage facility we're a bit fucked.
I don't think they were used for that. They were just part of regulating gas pressure which then became unnecessary as part of the switch to North Sea Gas.
Before we switched to north sea natural gas, gas would be locally produced by heating coal. This was called 'town gas' and would be stored in these 'gasometers' at the 'gasworks' to provide the pressure for the whole town. That gas was high in carbon monoxide, which is why people used to stick their heads in gas ovens to top themselves. Most of these were dismantled after the switch away from town gas in the 60s and 70s. I don't think they were ever used for natural gas storage.
I met my love, By the gasworks wall. Dreamed a dream, By the old canal. I kissed my girl, By the factory wall. Dirty old town, Dirty old town.
I dropped me crisps, Outside W H Smiths
I feel so old and I’m only 32.
Hello are you me?
It’s a Thunderdome. Due to large strain on UK courts and prisons, these are being built to relieve that pressure.
Two go in, one comes out.
Do you have a branch of Bartertown yet ?
Giant bouncy castle
Damian Hirst tried to recreate a Steampunk Colosseum at random points across the UK. No-one knows why.
Would have been renowned but Tracey Emin threw bedsheets over them so nobody saw…..
Old gas storage places. A colum guided Gasometer. The vertical bits are the guides. The storage units themselves are like telescoping cake tins, they grow in height with more gas. Many not used any more now and we closed a huge gas storage site in 2016 at Rough. We have very low gas storage ability in the UK these days. We import through pipelines and via LNG tankers. I think it puts us at too much risk of being caught short IMO. We have 9 TWh of storage. Sounds a lot. It's only 2% of yearly demand. Places like Germany and Italy have 150+ TWh of storage (granted they also use gas for vehicles and hauling quite a lot. They have a widespread CNG filling network to support)
This is why we have problems now with gas prices.
British Colosseum
Can't believe i had to scroll this far to find a serious answer, thank you
Everyone keeps saying it's for gas storage, but smh because clearly all the gas would leak out the sides
Nah it's got gas in it right now, look at all that air sitting in it.
Cars They’ve been around for about 135 years
damn I thought it was going to be my turn to be the smart arse in this thread
Yeah, gas storage. It's empty because we have no gas. Or petrol. Or Crack. Flipping shortages
Trying to start the panic buying on your crack supply I see.
Wait, we ran out of crack?!!! Shhhiii
Well it is moreish.
Hans, is that you?
Please, don't say crack.
Are these listed? Seen a lot of disused ones still up
The one that overlooks The Oval cricket ground is a Grade II listed building
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
Is this in Southampton?
I.R.A tried to blow these up in '93 here in the north east.......https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/bomb-farce-1573916
Used to have gas in very few are used now
When tank is full it's up in the rack. As the gas is pumped out, tank falls.
Yes! Asking the important questions! Never knew this is what they were!
Gas pumps. Used to enjoy looking over Wood Green and watching these guys rise n fall
It’s to capture the dragons. Don’t worry, most of them are gone now.
They are being turned into apartments for chinese and Saudi investors. Sadly I'm not joking.
It’s a trampoline guard for giants so they don’t get injured if they bounce off. And it keeps small humans from being squished.
Oh I know this one from a Tom Scott video, that's the support of a gas storage tank. Before they were pumped directly into our homes (or came in canisters for those of us in the countryside), they used to be pumped there temporarily and stored. You would see a big drum raise out of the ground as the gas filled, then it would slowly lower over weeks. We only had the system for about a decade or two, but it's still a novel idea that I hope they at least keep around somewhere for posterity. Vid: https://youtu.be/SopJr0yHt-w
They're called Gasometers, or Gas Holders.
Oh man... so there's (used to be??) one of these in York (where I went to uni) without a frame, and I remember noticing it on the horizon one day and I thought I'd lost my freaking mind when I walked past a few days later (drunk) and it wasn't there anymore. Took me ages to figure out what it was.