Netherlands Gas Tokens

Token Issuing Municipalities

(incudes a few privately issued tokens)

• cities and Municipalities A - F

• cities and Municipalities G - L

• cities and Municipalities M - S

• cities and Municipalities T - Z

Almost all tokens were issued by municipalities. These are lower governments that may be split or merged to accommodate developments in time. The name of former independent municipalities may live on in the name of a quarter. There is no distinction between a municipality and a town or between a town and a city.

Some gas factories delivered gas to villages around the central part of the municipality (buitengemeente).

Gas as a source of energy in the Netherlands

Natural gas, often found together with oil, could not be used commercially, until an infrastructure for transport and storage was built and that would happen only when enough demand was foreseen. However, compared to coal and oil, gas is relatively clean. Amsterdam founded the first municipal gas (based on rapeseed oil) company in 1825, mainly for street lighting. Rotterdam followed suit in 1826 with a plant using natural gas. As electric street lights replaced gas light, municipal companies turned towards industrial plants and, increasingly, to consumers.

Slowly, but faster after the second world war, oil replaced coal and gas for heating and driving, as oil was both cheaper and safer, while, due to the invention of the electric light bulb, electricity replaced gas in lighting. Gas remained a viable option for cooking and heating water, though.

Gas consumption was heavily influenced by the discovery of a large gas field in the North of the Netherlands in 1959. Gas consumption was encouraged with subsidies. The exploitation of the gas was entrusted to a state monopoly, Nederlands Gasunie. This company built a dense pipeline distribution network, obviating the municipal companies and their storage facilities. Due to the greening of the country and more efficient technology, the company saw its turnover diminish from 1.7 billion euros in 2011 to 1.2 billion euros in 2018. In the framework of preventing climate change, a further downturn in use is to be expected, all the more because gas exploitation has made the land above the gas field unstable.

Gas meters

Municipal gas companies originally billed afterwards, as use could not be determined ahead of time. As they acquired more individual clients, problems with collecting bills mounted. The gas meter solved this problem. In 1888, R.W. Brownhills from Birmingham demonstrated a gas meter. His machine was adopted in the UK and, in 1895, in the Netherlands.

Gas meter tokens

There are a few cases of regional gas plants and of special clients, often an enterprise using a large quantity of gas at a special tariff, therefore against different tokens.

Periods and designs

Originally, the meters took circulating coins: 2½ cent pieces. Three of those would buy a cubic meter of gas, but since the price of gas was 7 cents for a cubic meter, the collector had to repay the difference on emptying the coins from the meter. In addition, the number of coins needed for the meter was so large that a scarcity developed, while in big cities, collectors had to be accompanied by a person carrying his voluminous and heavy load of coins.

In the first world war, gas became scarce, raising its price and the number of coins needed for payment. As trade recovered in 1918, tokens were introduced. The municipality of Roermond, vulnerable to scarcity of Dutch coins because it is outside the centre of the country and in a poor mining area, ordered tokens at the Dutch mint in Utrecht. The experiment must have been a success, because in 1920, 23 other municipalities, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, ordered tokens as well. The Utrecht mint offered aluminium tokens that lightened the load of the collectors, solving a weighty problem.

Using the catalogue

The quickest way to find a token is to start typing the name of the issuing city in the search field (upper right of each page). Disregard words like gasfabriek (gas plant), gaspenning (gas token), goed voor (good for) and gemeente (municipality).

Remember that you can see an enlargement by double clicking on a picture.

Weights and diameters are the official numbers. Observed weights and diameters differ slightly, mostly downward.

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References

A.J. Kooij, Catalogus van Nederlandse betaal- en reclamepenningen, third edition, ISBN 9789070067267