Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Town gas from coal - The Óbuda Gas Works (1913-84)

■ Cook, bake, heat: the three words flashing sequentially above Erzsébet tér hör thirty years were taken down and discarded in 2005 as an austerity measure

bombardment inefficient against water breaking into the factory premises. Continuous production was restored a few weeks after the war ended, and as the gas works was made operational once again, the pipe system was also restored. Residents of Buda were the first to be supplied with gas again, but with the wooden pontoon bridge at Boráros tér being fitted with a gas main, the Pest side, too, was soon reconnected. By October of 1945, the works produced a daily amount of 200,000 cubic metres of gas. After such promising beginnings, new difficulties were only too quick to appear.

The gas works was obliged to use coal mined around Komló and Pécs; this was improved by the addition of Czech and Polish coal but unreliable transportation interrupted the continuous flow of imports and the country’s own reserves of coal were required for other purposes, too. That was why the gas supply was limited to three or four hours a day, at a time when large quantities of natural gas were going to waste on the oil fields of South-Zala. To ease gas shortages, natural gas from South- Zala was transported to Budapest in such a manner that the pipelines alternatively carried either crude oil or natural gas. Another pipeline was meant to serve the purposes of the country's industrialisation by transporting the furnace gas of the Danube Iron Works to Budapest. (This was terminated when transfer from town gas to natural gas was implemented.)

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