Too much fuel.

[Zourin]

Solid Fuel.

It's everywhere, there's too much of it.

Petroleum Gas? I can't produce enough of it. I get maybe 2-4 bits of plastic out of a chem lab every 10 seconds or so while I wait for the next hit off the refinery. In the meantime: gallons, and gallons, and gallons of unneeded light and heavy oil.. and gallons, and gallons, and gallons. What do you do with it?

- Replace coal at your starting power plant. Check.
- Build new power plants at your refineries. Check.
- Dismantle the solar farm so you can burn more Solid fuel. Check.
- Ignore Electric Furnaces entirely and run your entire smelting operation off Solid Fuel. Check.
- Shotgun Steel chest full of Solid Fuel. Check.
- Hit a chest full of solid fuel with a flamethrower. (Disappointedly) check.
- Rocket Launcher. Check.

Petroleum gas? Huge tech bottleneck, just because I got solid fuel coming out my.. check.

[ssilk]

You can put the oil into the steam engine, works like warm water. No good solution, but keeps it playable.

[kovarex]

You used some convincing arguments there

[rk84]

Solid Fuel.
- Ignore Electric Furnaces entirely and run your entire smelting operation off Solid Fuel. Check.

But furnaces have effectivity 1 and boiler has effectivity 0.5
So How about Electric Furnaces with production modules?

[ray4ever]

I have the same problem with too much solid fuel which I can't burn Light and heavy oil definitely need some other / more uses.

[kovarex]

We agreed to make recipes that could convert the heavy/light oil to petroleum gas in chemical plant.

[Zourin]

I think the problem lies with the resultant mix.

Solid fuel is a wee bit too powerful. Half-strength should be fine, let it burn off faster @ 1600ish.Tweak both refinement mixes to give more petroleum in general. A refinery doesn't produce enough petroleum to even warrant a tank when you're making sulfur/plastic, and the pipes stay dry.

The last thing I need are more mismatched chem labs (like how the interface for Flamethrower Fuel at the chem lab is backwards compared to the refinery), or even more chem labs when the problem is the worthless goop coming out of the refinery.

Alternately.. plastics out of light oil? Petroleum is pulling quad duty already. Plastics, Batteries, Processors and Explosives, and not enough Petrol for even one of these. Need to spread the load, especially if I need five refineries to keep the chip plants rolling. Crashing cars into worms with trunks full of solid fuel is next on my list.

Of course, I've mentioned it before.. can't we just pipe it into a gas turbine generator and evolve past the stone age steam boilers? I'm pretty sure that if I can pull a Tony Stark and whip up a personal fusion reactor, I can find a way to combust oil directly into power...

[Calico]

We agreed to make recipes that could convert the heavy/light oil to petroleum gas in chemical plant.

Sounds like a good solution for the time beeing. I'd rather have more useful products from Light/Heavy but converting with a bit of super science magic seems fine until you give the oil industry a second pass.

Anything that helps me get rid of the stored 45K of Solid Fuel is good.

[Zourin]

A stopgap fix is to simply destroy-rebuild a tank full of light oil. That destroys the oil inside and prevents the refinery from backing up.

Sulfur and Plastics production each consume 3 Petroleum Gas every second.
With Refining 2, the most favorable of the two, a refinery only produces 5.5 every 5 seconds. You would need three refineries just to meet the demand of a single factory, forget about one of each. That's six refineries for optimal throughput, and 12 crude per second.

In the meantime, Flamethrower Fuel and Lubricant aside (these are 'on the side' intermediaries), you have these.

1 heavy oil every 5 seconds. This can produce 1 Lubricant every 5 seconds (every cycle) or 1 solid fuel every 10 seconds (two cycles). There really isn't a need for tanks here either. You only need 1 lubricant plant for the engines/electrical engines, but that backs up because you don't need constant flows of engines. That means we'd have to have three heavy oil plants producing Solid Fuel. That's 3 solid fuel per second. Enough to run the refineries power plant by itself.

But Light oil? Holy crap. Six refineries? 5.4 light oil per second. With the solid fuel taking only 1 light oil every 3 seconds, that's 8ish Light OIl-Solid Fuel plants to keep the sulfur and plastic running.

You need to move Light Oil over to the plastic recipe. Give Petroleum Gas over to sulfur -> Sulfuric acid and explosives, and let the point of oversupply provide the most needed bulk product (plastic). Heavy Oil can do fine for making solid fuel on its lonesome, and if you need more, it's not tough to get.

The biggest problem with the oil industry is that everything stops in any one of three oversupply scenarios. Everything else simply pauses, but doesn't interfere with other processes. If you are not using EVERYTHING in perfect measure at the same time, you gridlock the refinery.

[sparr]

Are you using basic or advanced oil processing? Advanced increases the gas to oil production ratio by 50%.

[Zourin]

Those numbers are the advanced processing.

And on top of it, all three refineries have to be in the same location because of the pipe limitation.

So you need:

• 3 Refineries
• 1 Lubricant Plant
• 1 Flamethrower Fuel Plant
• 1 Sulfur Plant
• 1 Plastic Plant
• 3 Heavy Oil -> Solid Fuel plants
• ~8 light oil -> Solid fuel plants

I'm running two physically separated refineries right now.. and there's not enough plastic for 3 advanced circuit plants to run continuously.

[Bleda]

Make rocket production use light fuel and put them back into the blue sciencepack recipe. That way two types of oil are used for blue science. Heavy oil can then be used for lubricant and solid fuel. Batteries are needed in smaller quantities for accumulators and electric motors.

Conversion recipes are a good solution for now. But then, we really need a valve that only opens when all the storage tanks are filled and the pipe gets blocked.

Oh, and burning off the oil in steam engines is ok, but why don't you let us spill it out into the sea by building a pipe that ends on the shore?

[MaxStrategy]

The oil industry makes me a bit dizzy and frustrated. I'm curious to see what production layouts people have since post-oil mine is far from optimized and looks like some sort of Kafkaesque labyrinth of pipes inspired by Cthulhu. I'm eagerly awaiting the next few weeks of patches before I post proper feedback

[Zourin]

This arragement in my new play (I'm a pathological restarter) is pretty much what it takes to ensure your system doesn't back up.



This has tapered fuel output considerably, although I haven't dealt with the lubricant-heavy backup yet.. may keep the fuel from that. The inserter-boiler-steam engine configuration instantly burns off excess light oil as it's pumped. This certainly isn't in the realm of conventional gameplay thinking, so much as discovering that steam engines will effectively destroy any hot liquid (astoundingly fast too, as it drained two tanks of light oil within a few minutes)

The problem I'm having on this play is that the area around my spawn.. is almost devoid of oil.Just enough to get going, at least.

[syneris]

After running out of solid fuel while building and expanding, I have decided to not use it for boilers. I had 5 plants turning light oil in to solid fuel, thousands in stock, and excess heavy oil went to the steam engine. I let my production idle while restructuring my metal smelting layout using blueprints (extremely awesome), but didn't even think about petroleum backing up to 4k (plus 4k acid). I was still pulling around 15Mw even though my factory was mostly idle since I have a lot of laser turrets on standby.

And then came the blackout... I had burned through thousands of solid fuel while being engrossed with my new furnace setup (now @ 50 iron/30 copper). I scrounged what all I could from anywhere, but my power drain was so bad that I couldn't keep up hand-loading the boilers. I loaded an autosave from just before I was completely out of fuel and rerouted the coal going to my plastic plants. Luckily, I had recently extended one of my train lines to add a small coal operation. It was just a few miners sitting on a huge, high-density patch so that I wouldn't need to risk running out for plastics. It now has 36 electric miners digging out coal for all my steam engines.

I'll still use solid fuel for furnaces as it is more efficient than electric (without effectivity) and takes less space. This way, I'll only lose production if I ever run out again and not my entire defense grid.

*edit* I don't really like the concept of recipes to convert the different liquids. Wouldn't that defeat the point of refineries outputting all 3 types? Light oil for sulfur isn't realistic either afaik. I think it is more of a balance issue (likely plastics, but possibly other petroleum based products).

[ray4ever]

*edit* I don't really like the concept of recipes to convert the different liquids. Wouldn't that defeat the point of refineries outputting all 3 types? Light oil for sulfur isn't realistic either afaik. I think it is more of a balance issue (likely plastics, but possibly other petroleum based products).

Sulfur is actually solved in somewhat high amounts in oil. Usually it's a side product in the refinery process and not separately extracted from the oil.
Converting gas to light or heavy oil is indeed unrealistic, but it is common in reality to crack the long hydrocarbon chains in heavy oil into smaller chains (light oil and gas).

[Zourin]

Heavy OIl as a primary source of solid fuel is generally not going to produce enough to maintain even a small power generator, much less a megacomplex.

To do something that large, you would still need heavy oil and two light oil factories pumping solid fuel, possibly even multiple refineries (and the oil production to match, which isn't easy considering how fast they drain)

Having enough solar power to run the day cycles is also important, as it conserves considerable amounts of fuel through most of the day-night cycle (nights are usually pretty short). Once you do that, you can design an auxiliary solid-fuel powered steam power plant using an accumulator coupling (two adjacent substations belonging to two different power networks sharing an accumulator bank) to handle spikes. You still want a primary steam plant for daytime operation, but having an aux that triggers when the accumulators drain will prevent blackout power starvation.