Netherlands Gas Tokens
Token Issuing Municipalities
(incudes a few privately issued tokens)
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 charged
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
Producers
Using the catalogue
References
Ref used : A.J. Kooij, Catalogus van Nederlandse betaal- en reclamepenningen