Coal Liquefication - how does it work?

[Quax]

Hi folks, I now tried to circumvent my oil shortage by switching to coal liquefication, but I'm not sure I understand how it works: I thought that after adding a minor quantity of heavy oil from an external source, that the process would need no more heavy oil to be inserted, given that the process generates heavy oil, part of which I can re-insert into the refinery to keep it going.

However, that didn't work. After providing heavy oil from another refinery, my coal liquefication started to work but ended soon after.

What am I doing wrong?

[DaveMcW]

You need to prioritize feeding heavy oil back into the refineries. This can be as simple as making the pipe shorter, or you can use circuit controlled tanks and pumps to turn off lubricant/cracking when heavy oil is low.

[astroshak]

I tend to put the Refineries far enough apart that I simply have a pipe wrap around the Refinery to send created HO back to the HO input.

I also do not start turning HO into Lube, or LO, unless I have more than a few k HO in the collections tank. This ensures that there is enough remaining to restart the liquifaction process if it stops for some reason.

[theolderbeholder]

just route al HO through a singl tank first and loop back into the refinieries. Then add a second output qith a pump right behind it into the fracking columns. one ciruit wire connects the pump to the tank and is set to "enable > 10000 HO". This is all it takes. Yes, I was afraid of circuits at first as well.

[Quax]

Great, it's working now. I added a storage tank to store the heavy oil, and seprated the refineries and the chemical plants by pumps. These pumps are now enabled only if the storage tank contains more then 500 heavy oil. 500 because I'm running 10 refineries, where each needs 25 oil for a start. So I always have double the amount of heavy oil available as what is needed to start my refineries.
So actually I'm kinda proud of myself currently
Only thing I still have to solve is to limit the heavy oil storage in my tank to let's say 1000. I already tried to add a pump and enable it only if the storage tank contains less then 1000 oil, but for some reason this immediately made my whole refinery came to a halt. Have to investigate in this further, but this should then be another topic in case I cannot solve it. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I only have one pipe going back to all ten refineries. So I don't have a pipeline for each refinery, but I connected the heavy oil output pipes from all refineries and from that made one pipline back to the insert point of the refineries.

[Amarula]

Only thing I still have to solve is to limit the heavy oil storage in my tank to let's say 1000. I already tried to add a pump and enable it only if the storage tank contains less then 1000 oil, but for some reason this immediately made my whole refinery came to a halt.

I think to limit the tank to 1000 oil, you need to enable the pump when the tank contains more than 1000.

[netmand]

I connected the heavy oil output pipes from all refineries and from that made one pipline back to the insert point of the refineries.

When the output is full the refineries will stop. Try adding some heavy oil processing to reduce the excess heavy oil (for example: Solid Fuel) so the next output has someplace to go. Each refinery will produce 90 heavy oil when running the coal liquefaction recipe and you are already routing 25 back to the input for the next recipe run, but you still need to do something with the 65 heavy oil left over. Otherwise it will accumulate until the system is full.

[astroshak]

I personally find that Basic Oil Processing (duh) and Advanced Oil Processing both produce too little Heavy Oil for my Lubrication wants/desires. To meet the Lube demand, I will set up Coal Liquifaction.

As I said in an earlier post, I put the Refineries far enough apart that I can run a line for HO from the output back up to the input on each Refinery. This is not strictly necessary, however. You can accomplish the HO return by sending the production of each CL Refinery to three tanks, one for each output. Take the HO tank and put three pumps on it (should be one inlet line, and three outlet lines, on the Tank). One, send it back to the HO inputs on each CL Refinery. Wire the other two to the tank. Set one to operate when you have HO > 1000 (or whatever minimum HO you want to ensure that you have enough should the system become stopped due to backpressure or starvation) and send that pump’s output to Lube. Set the other pump to operate when HO > 20000 (twenty thousand) and send it at your HO->LO cracking Chemical Plants.

Never convert HO directly into Solid Fuel. 40 HO turns into 30 LO. 40 HO could be turned into 2 SF. 30 LO turns into 3 SF. You get more SF, and thus potentially more Rocket Fuel if that’s your goal, by cracking HO into LO before making SF.

[Voidedfactory]

One thing I do (and this only applies if you like to use mods) is that I have the Flow Control mod and use the top-up valve on the pipes re-routing heavy oil to the refineries and overflow valves on the outgoing heavy oil so that it should always divert first to the refineries to ensure they continue running before depositing any towards lube/light oil processing.

If you don't, astroshak's idea should work wonders as well.