Factorio Forums

In short, is it possible to mod the operation of a refinery so it will:

1) continue production if at least one of it's outputs is below the half of the respective output storage limit;
2) waste any products that did not fit into the output storage limits by voiding the excess products and generating spikes of pollution proportional to the amount of voided liquids.

Who want to know the idea it came from, here is a full explanation.

Check out the code for Tailings Pond from Pyanodon's Coal Processing :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pycoalprocessing

Flare Stack, and the similar devices in many large mods, make it fairly easy to implement your own version of this without needing to change the refinery at all. (Also, is how the real world does it much of the time, if that is your thing.)

I'd certainly recommend it as a solid strategy for destroying the excess of whatever fluid you have in excess, which in turn permits the refinery to continue to generate the rest.

Roughly a million different base game and mod choices exist on how you determine "excess" and control it, the simplest being a tank wired directly to a pump that leads to the flare stacks, and with enable set on the pump to "<fluid> >= 24500", no combinators needed.