January: What a Gas!
- What are we looking at here, and where is it?
This is the Gasometer in Duisburg-Hamborn, Germany.
- What’s a gasometer, and what’s it used for?
A gasometer is a container that stores purified gases created as by-products of steel manufacturing and subsequently used to generate energy. The gasometer is used to balance out peaks in energy generation and consumption.
- How is the gas stored, and how does this system function?
Gasometers are disk-type gas holders. The disk inside the gas holder rises to the top and is filled with a certain volume of gas that is consequently stored. When the gas is removed from the gas holder, the disk is moved downwards and correspondingly reduces the stored volume. In principle, this is similar to the way that a French press for coffee works.
- What happens to the gas once it’s been removed from the Gasometer?
The gas, which has been previously purified and compressed, is removed from the gas holder using suction funs, compressed under even greater pressure, and then fed in to the energy cycle. The gas is used to heat up furnaces or to generate power in power plants.
