Can I use oil to produce energy?

[Zourin]

Is there any way of getting rid of all the solid fuel I am accumulating? I am running a few refineries to produce petroleum gas for plastics, but the heavy oil is only useful for lubricant, and light oil doesn't seem to be used for anything other than fuel. An option to just burn/dump it would be nice.

Split your pipes and run half to a steam engine. You will still get some oil going to making solid fuel. You can also mix heavy and light oil to make flamer fuel, good for burning down trees. I'm rarely using electric furnaces now, because solid fuel is just so abundant once you need to make advanced products.

It would be really cool if the liquid network could somehow connect with the circuit network. Smart valves could be used to open and close fluid access based on configurable criteria similar to smart inserters for chests.

Wait? How does a steam engine run on oil? (RTFM doesn't work when the manual is out of date!)

[liq3]

Well, I did some calculations on oil as fuel. It's not that great. You get about 5.08 MJ from Oil Process 1 and 6.6425 MJ after Oil Process 2 for one bit of crude oil. Coal is 4 MJ. This is including all the processing (including steam engines, which halve the output). If you use the -80% power on the processing it goes up to 7.516 MJ for P1, and 9.1 for P2, so that helps a lot. You get about 100 oil from 1% on the oil fields (seems to be more from fields over 100%, and less from ones below it), so a 100% oil field gives about 9,000 oil before it reaches 10%. So without the power modules a bit of oil is worth about 50% more then coal with P2. So a 200% oil field is worth about 30,000 coal over time (and then about 0.15 coal per second when it runs out).

hrm. With the power modules you could get 730kW out of a 0.1 oil field, though you need -80% modules in everything that touches the oil.

Personally I'd rather just use oil for products, and use the coal as fuel. Maybe if I get too much oil I'd use it as fuel.

@The Guy above me: you can convert the Heavy Oil, Light Oil, and Petroleum Gas into Solid Fuel, and Solid Fuel burns like coal (giving 25MJ).

[Zourin]

Well, I did some calculations on oil as fuel. It's not that great. You get about 5.08 MJ from Oil Process 1 and 6.6425 MJ after Oil Process 2 for one bit of crude oil. Coal is 4 MJ. This is including all the processing (including steam engines, which halve the output). If you use the -80% power on the processing it goes up to 7.516 MJ for P1, and 9.1 for P2, so that helps a lot. You get about 100 oil from 1% on the oil fields (seems to be more from fields over 100%, and less from ones below it), so a 100% oil field gives about 9,000 oil before it reaches 10%. So without the power modules a bit of oil is worth about 50% more then coal with P2. So a 200% oil field is worth about 30,000 coal over time (and then about 0.15 coal per second when it runs out).

hrm. With the power modules you could get 730kW out of a 0.1 oil field, though you need -80% modules in everything that touches the oil.

Personally I'd rather just use oil for products, and use the coal as fuel. Maybe if I get too much oil I'd use it as fuel.

@The Guy above me: you can convert the Heavy Oil, Light Oil, and Petroleum Gas into Solid Fuel, and Solid Fuel burns like coal (giving 25MJ).

That's what i thought.. still tethered to water. >.< My hopes were that you could just pipe the oil straight into an engine and burn it off for power without needing additional processing. Something so that you can generate non-solar energy in places not near water.

That does make the average oil field almost the same as a coal field, with the added annoyance of processing and additional pollution generation. It almost looks 'space efficient' until you take into account storage tanks and refineries, and the obscene cost of oil barrels (25 iron? BS!). Now my only probem is finding some way of fighting biter nests without a car to open up some real-estate. I just as well be on a death world on medium settings, i'm always horridly confined.

I'm a bit confused how steam engines halve power output? I know that coal is listed (at least in the wiki) at 8KJ (now 8MJ?), but i'm not sure how that's transitioned into electrical power (thus, being able to reverse the equation and determine how much coal/fuel is consumed by a factory). Based on a little bit of math, it should take a burner ~20 seconds (T=J/W) to burn a peice of coal with 8kJ (wiki) at the listed rate of 390W (wiki) (i'm pulling at strings), that gets turned into 100-degree water, then consumed for 510W at the steam plant.. And I know that the wiki's not updated for 0.9 and the units all were multiplied by 1k, but that shouldn't affect time burnt..

*brain melts*

It's bad enough kerbal space program made me go back to physics-based calculus, but I really didn't spend nearly as much time in electrical engineering classes, nor do I know the algorithms used in Factorio for power generation >.< It's like engineering by voodoo.

Edit:
Have you considerd your equation by a processing plant powered entirely by solar (therefore no effective loss in production yield to power itself)

[BurnHard]

@Darthlawsuit: what do you want to say with your picture of the distilling process?

I looked up energy values of these substances again, and measured in Joule/kg all of these fuels should have the same energy value inherited per mass unit. Heavy oil, light oil and gas. They are all about 40-42 kJ/kg in RL.

[liq3]

@Zourin: I have no idea why the steam engines have the power. I just know if I stick a piece of coal in a furnace, put some steam in, and then hook it up to a accumulator, it gives 4MJ, half the stated 8MJ of coal. Same with the Solid Fuel.

As for oil without processing, if I remove all reduction (including steam), it's 16.25 and 19.123 for P1 and 2 respectively. So you lose nearly a 1/3rd of your power to processing. The -80% power modules reduce it to about 1/20th lost to processing. Then again I suppose if you really want to save power, you can just stick efficiency modules in everything. XD

And yeh, the oil industry is crazy huge. o.o I can't imagine what mine is going to look like when I finally get it running properly (and neatly).

[Coolthulhu]

It's the boiler that wastes energy.

energy_consumption = "390kW",
burner =
{
effectivity = 0.5,
fuel_inventory_size = 1,
emissions = 0.1 / 6.5,
},

[Zourin]

It's the boiler that wastes energy.

energy_consumption = "390kW",
burner =
{
effectivity = 0.5,
fuel_inventory_size = 1,
emissions = 0.1 / 6.5,
},

Yeah, I realized it was the boiler after some looking. 390W is what does it, that's even more than double a furnace!

[y.petremann]

Is there any way of getting rid of all the solid fuel I am accumulating? I am running a few refineries to produce petroleum gas for plastics, but the heavy oil is only useful for lubricant, and light oil doesn't seem to be used for anything other than fuel. An option to just burn/dump it would be nice.

The same goes for me, plastics and sulfur was them only things I've needed.
I've not tested all things of the game but I can give you some ideas :

• Use it as your main source of energy instead of coal and solar energy (Don't destroy your alternative power plants, simply cut the wire maually).
• Stock them in a extremely large deposit.
• Burn them for free (If you produce more Solid Fuel than you consume, make an alternate electric network with a large energy consumer for free, put all the lights on, make trains running over and over without reasons, make your logistics robots doing things over and over (Maybe moving your fuel from a chest to another indefinitely), using radars ...
  To make it the efficient way to burn them, your boiler and steam engines must work without stopping (else the case of fuel not availlable)
  I think that should be a really big waste, but it has the advantage to keep your factory working on plastic, sulfur and lubricant.

[ssilk]

You know, that you can convert the oil sorts to other oil? For example light oil to gas?
And if you want to waste energy, the radar is the most efficient method...