Dunedin Gasworks Museum

The Dunedin Gas Light and Coke Company was founded in 1862 with the intention to erect a small plant to supply 50 street lamps. However Dunedin was a rapidly expanding town due to the Otago Gold Rush, and soon a contract was negotiated with the Town Board for supply of 150 street lamps for 7 years and it was decided that a larger site was required. The projector and engineer was Stephen Stamp Hutchison, who had worked for the City of Melbourne Gas & Coke Company and the London Gas Works.

Production of gas began in May 1863, but the first street lamp was not lit until September due to a delay by the Dunedin Town Board in erecting the lamp standards. Uptake of gas among the public was slow at first because the price to demestic consumers was set very high.

In 1876 the City Council took over the gasworks and made some improvements including a new retort house. Then in 1881 Stephen Hutchison built another gasworks, in Caversham. This new gasworks competed with the City Gasworks, and won the contract to supply the boroughs of Caversham, Mornington, and Roslyn.

A new Retort House and gas holder were built in 1906, but in 1915 the gas holder was moved to a new site in Wilkie Road after unstable subsoil at the original site caused it structural damage. In 1927 a Glover-West Vertical Retort House was built and new exhausting and pumping machinery was installed, inluding the surviving Bryan Donkin Booster. As demand for gas increased the larger Waller Exhausters were installed over the next twelve years. Then in 1962 a Woodall-Duckham Vertical Retort House was built to replace the Glover-West plant, and the old horizontal retorts were removed.

The coal plant was nearing the end of its life in the mid-1980s, and the cost of a refit could not be justified given the declining use of gas in Dunedin. Other New Zealand gasworks had already closed, making Dunedin both the first and last place in the country where coal gas was manufactured. In July 1986 the DCC Trading Committee voted unanimously to convert entirely to the reforming of LPG through the MS Reformer for town gas supply. The Woodall-Duckham Vertical Retort House was closed down in June 1987, ending the era of gasworks in New Zealand.

The Vertical Retort House was demolished in 1989, and since then the old gasworks structures have been demolished and the land progressively sold off and developed. The gas holder in Wilkie Road was demolished in 2000.