Lowering Pollution via Equipment Alternatives

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krlsmnk
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Lowering Pollution via Equipment Alternatives

Post by krlsmnk »

There exist several mods which add electric versions of all the furnaces, but those furnaces produce the same amount of pollution as coal-fueled furnaces, so there isn't much point unless you run out of coal. Having these furnaces emit half as much, or no pollution, would make more sense to me.

Also, burning wood should lower the pollution output of any device that can be run on coal. Would make it useful for something besides poles, especially when you start clearing it out in bulk.

First request, so I'm trying to keep it simple.

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darkfrei
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Re: Lowering Pollution via Equipment Alternatives

Post by darkfrei »

krlsmnk wrote:
Thu Feb 28, 2019 11:16 pm
First request, so I'm trying to keep it simple.
Your mod is:
place into data-final-fixes.lua this code:

Code: Select all

for furnace_name, furnace in pairs (data.raw.furnace) do
  if furnace.energy_source and furnace.energy_source.type and furnace.energy_source.type == "electric" then
    furnace.energy_source.emissions = 0
  end
end
Compatible with all mods, all electrical furnaces. You are need to config the file info.json like it was done in all another mods and place both files into mod folder.

I hope that you can make your first mod.

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mrudat
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Re: Lowering Pollution via Equipment Alternatives

Post by mrudat »

I couldn't find any concrete numbers, but there are various technologies that can be applied to exhaust gasses to both remove pollution and recover useful chemicals.

You could perhaps have stuff like Electrostatic precipitators or various other forms of air scrubber that can be researched, and then added to existing pollution-producing buildings, so you could have 3-4 tiers of pollution control, and 3-4 tiers of less-polluting buildings.

It sounds like it would not be unreasonable to reduce pollution by perhaps 50-80% (multiplicative) with each stage of filtering, while increasing energy usage; from what I've been reading, for some processes you can capture usable volumes of steam to offset the energy costs of air filtering, or perhaps actually reduce total energy expenditure in some cases.

Additionally H2S, and various forms of SOx can be turned into sulfuric acid (as Angels does, for example), as well as capturing NO2, Hg and various other pollutants.

On the other hand, you can't realistically reduce pollution to 0; logically pollution indicates not only air pollution, but also noise pollution (which insulation could reduce), vibration (which is harder to reduce), and thermal pollution (raising average temperature near your factory), which you can't really do anything about, given that you're at best taking in solar power and using it (rather than storing it as more grass/trees), and at worst you're digging up coal and uranium and releasing spent heat after extracting useful energy from them.

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