problem with advanced oil production

[deadyoukai]

I am having a problem with the production of lubricant, the production of heavy oil stops and I cannot continue manufacturing lubricant to make electric motors, does anyone know why this happens? I'm about to abandon the game because of this, I hope someone can give me a solution

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[eugenekay]

Advanced Oil Processing requires more setup than the Basic Recipe:

Advanced oil processing and coal liquefaction produce multiple fluids: heavy oil, light oil and petroleum gas. The refinery will stop production of all products if one product output is full, so it should be ensured that the products are transported out of the refinery; any products that cannot be used should be (temporarily) stored in a storage tank. Furthermore, both heavy oil and light oil can be cracked to the next lower type in a chemical plant (recipe above). This is useful if the player has an abundance of one product, but is lacking another (a common problem).

In your screenshot, you only have Storage Tanks on the Lubricant output. This will lead to Fluid Output Full in the refinery pretty quickly. Try:
- Connect all the Light oil and Petroleum Gas outputs from the Oil Refineries together. You will probably need to move the current Chemical Plants out of the way
- Add some Buffer Tanks to the Oil/Gas pipelines. These will fill up unless used… you can click the Tank and then the Trashcan icon to (manually) empty them
- Look in the Tech tree (or Wiki) for a way to utilize the “extra” outputs to make more advanced products

Good Luck!

[Muche]

When a machine's output is full it stops working.
In this case your refineries are full of Light oil and Petroleum gas. You need to use them, either immediately, or store them temporarily in storage tank for later use.

[Tertius]

You need to embed oil processing as a whole into your factory. You have demand for all three products of advanced oil processing: petroleum gas (mainly for plastic bars and sulfur), light oil (mainly for solid fuel), heavy oil (mainly for lubricant).
So build production for all these products as well and connect it to your refineries. You don't need lubricant alone, you always need everything.

The challenge is that you don't consume the 3 oil products with the same ratio as they are produced by your oil refineries. The most requested oil product is petroleum gas (trust me, if you didn't realize this yet, you will realize when you proceed with the game). So regardless of the consumers you might have for light oil and heavy oil, you will always have surplus of light oil and heavy oil and a lack of petroleum gas. For this, there are the light oil cracking and heavy oil cracking recipes you use with a chemical plant to convert surplus heavy oil to light oil and to convert surplus light oil to petroleum gas.
Building a well balanced production for these 3 fluids is the challenge for managing oil.

[Kyralessa]

As others have noted, you need to strike a balance between heavy oil, light oil, and petroleum. If one fills up, your refineries won't work anymore.

A simple way to do this is to set up cracking heavy oil -> light oil and also set up cracking light oil -> petroleum.

Then set a pump to feed the heavy oil and a pump to feed the light oil.

Connect your storage tanks for each of the three oil types (heavy, light, petroleum) with green or red wire so you can read how much you have of each.

Then tell the heavy oil pump to only pump to cracking if you have more heavy oil than light oil, and tell the light oil pump to only pump to cracking if you have more light oil than petroleum.

This will keep all three products balanced.

If you run out of light oil, you crack from heavy. If you run out of petroleum, you crack from light.

And if you run out of heavy oil, you simply process more crude oil.

[deadyoukai]

Thank you all very much for taking your time to respond! I was finally able to solve it this way by putting tanks at all the oil outlets, it's a shame I can't transport the lubricant to my base but at least I can make the engines!!

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[Muche]

Fluids can be transported (long distances-wise) in fluid wagons on rail, or by barreling + transport + unbarrelling.

[wobbycarly]

Keep in mind that the light oil and petroleum tanks will fill up eventually and block the whole production ... again. Then you'll need to investigate cracking as mentioned by Tertius and Kyralessa. Could be worth setting up 4 train stations each with a fluid wagon train to bring all four products (lube, heavy, light and gas) back to your main base.

[Tertius]

The general idea is to have just oil extraction outposts and bring the crude oil with fluid wagons to your base, where you set up the whole advanced oil production chain with refineries and all. Oil processing directly at the oil wells isn't feasible in the long run. Why transport 3 different fluids when you need to transport only one?

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