The gas industry in a Spanish region: Galicia, 1850-1960

di Alberte Martínez López, Jesús Mirás, Elvira Lindoso
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 36 (2011), p. 9

Gas represents a unique case in the field of public services. On the one hand, it was the first urban networked infrastructure and on the other, the energy and environmental crisis that began in the 1970s relaunched its role among the energy sources. In Spain, its course has been discontinuous, ever since networks were dismantled in the 1940s-1950s in most regions and had to be rebuilt in order to distribute natural gas since the 1990s. The majority of studies on the implementation of gas in Spain are usually local case studies written by executives of the gas companies themselves and many do not go beyond the Civil War period (1936-39). The main objective of this paper is to trace the evolutionary lines of gas in the long term in a Spanish region, Galicia, which is representative, but also different from the most developed areas, such as Catalonia, which are usually more studied. The paper is structured, following a chronological order, in four major stages: the age of monopoly, the beginning of electric competition, the defeat by electricity, and the final decline.