The Auckland Gas Company is a company providing gas for residential or commercial customers in the Auckland

Auckland

The Auckland metropolitan area , in the North Island of New Zealand, is the largest and most populous urban area in the country with residents, percent of the country's population. Auckland also has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world...

 area, New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

. It is one of the oldest still existing brand names

Brand

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."...

 in New Zealand, having been established as Auckland Gas Company Ltd in 1862 or 1863. It is owned since 2004 by Nova Energy.

History

The Auckland Gas Company was formed in 1862 as the first joint stock company

Joint stock company

A joint-stock company is a type of corporation or partnership involving two or more individuals that own shares of stock in the company...

 in New Zealand. It was also the first private services provider in Auckland. In the 1870s, the company bought and developed a large site in Freemans Bay

Freemans Bay

Freemans Bay is the name of a former bay and now inner city suburb of Auckland, in the North Island of New Zealand. The historical bay was filled in to a large extent, and lost its shoreline to reclamation works...

 to build a gasworks

Gasworks

A gasworks or gas house is a factory for the manufacture of gas. The use of natural gas has made many redundant in the developed world, however they are often still used for storage.- Early gasworks :...

 (roughly on and east of the site of the current New World

New World (supermarket)

New World is a New Zealand full-service supermarket chain owned by the Foodstuffs cooperative.Founded in 1963, New World was the first American-style full-service supermarket brand of Foodstuffs, and the second in New Zealand...

 supermarket), with further buildings (mainly workshops) and offices on Beaumont Street.

In the late 1960s the Kapuni

Kapuni

Kapuni is a small hydrocarbons field and drilling site in the North Island of New Zealand. It is located within a dairy farming area in Taranaki, south of New Plymouth....

 gas fields were openened, providing natural gas

Natural gas

Natural gas is a naturally occurring gas mixture consisting primarily of methane, typically with 0–20% higher hydrocarbons . It is found associated with other hydrocarbon fuel, in coal beds, as methane clathrates, and is an important fuel source and a major feedstock for fertilizers.Most natural...

 which was cleaner and cheaper than the locally produced coal gas

Coal gas

Coal gas is a flammable gaseous fuel made by the destructive distillation of coal containing a variety of calorific gases including hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane and volatile hydrocarbons together with small quantities of non-calorific gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen...

variant, and the company stopped producing gas and became a supplier only. This led to most of the buildings in the Freemans Bay are being demolished.

External links

• Auckland Gas Company (official company website)