[QUOTE=eisenherz;262506][QUOTE=Hanna;262503]. Why is it so expensive now?

it is pure greed and capitalist market factors. shell-bp-gazprom etc; all the same = they milk the paying customer as much as they can for as long as they can
Yeah I *may* actually have worked for two of these. I think you can guess which ones, in that case. Surprised, huh? Since they are so rich, they are not bad places to be as an employee. But it's borderline whether you can look yourself in the mirror in the morning.

Don't know exactly what Russia did to XX, but it was certainly *something* which management tried to brush over and whitepaint. Received lots of cryptical emails trying to pretend all was well. In reality I think Russia *took* some of the business and simply gave it go Rosneft, then kicked out all the executives or something like that. And they couldn't hit back or say anything for the risk of jeopardizing their remaining interests in Russia, or negatively affecting the stock price. LOL. Go Putin!
And today, Angola. I think you are in the vicinity, eisenherz, right? and have an idea what they are up to there, while the locals are killing each other. It just makes me want to cry.

Earlier at YYYYY, lots of cryptical emails from management about "everything we do in Nigeria is PERFECTLY above water, the locals love us, anything else is just lies". Whereupon I looked into it and was totally disgusted, changing jobs at the next opportunity.

It's creepy how such companies obsessively TALK about community values, ecology, ethics, anti-corruption and then go out and do the exact opposite.

Yeah you are probably right. In Scandinavia, at the time it was cheap, I got the gas from the local state owned company. So that would explain the cheapness. Nobody was trying to make a profit. I don't know where they got the gas from. Russia or somewhere else. I think you can actually make household gas from petrol as well, so that might have been what they did. There was something called "the gas factory".

In the UK, all the gas companies were privatised some years back, not sure when. It was supposed to bring increased efficiency and competition resulting in lower prices. The exact opposite happened, and the whole thing is much debated in media.
Low income families actually struggle to afford heating their own homes. I've seen stories in the news about single mothers dressing up their kids in coats indoors in the winter.