Ruhr Gas

Representatives of the Krupp and Stinnes interests and the German Steel Cartel gathered in Berlin last week to inaugurate the mighty project of warming all Germany with coal gas piped directly from the mines of the Ruhr. Shortly investors will be permitted to supply a preliminary stake of $10,000,000.

The scheme: to distribute gas much as electricity is now distributed, over a national, super-power network of piping.

In order to operate such long lines very high gas pressures will have to be used, pressures which hitherto have been unfeasible, due to impossibility of preventing leakage at the innumerable joints in a pipe several score miles long. Announcement was made however by the new syndicate, called the Ruhr Gas Co., that development of a new pipe welding process has made it possible to operate without undue leakage lines several hundred miles in length.

The first long line to be constructed will run 125 miles from the Ruhr to Hanover, will cost $2,000,000 (estimated). Already a small, low pressure gas network is supplying 38 towns in the vicinity of the Ruhr.