Creating a new energy source

[Saktoth]

I'm trying to create a more complex energy system that will turn water and coal into into steam and smoke (two new fluids you can pump, manage, etc), but I'm having trouble actually making this recipe create energy. I've tried negative energy consumption, but this doesn't seem to work. You can run steam engines on any fluid (From crude oil to sulphuric acid) but a fluid with a max temperature much higher than water does not seem to add that much efficiency to the steam engine. Having the steams default temperature be over 100 doesn't work either, as the default temperature is the 0 energy state even if it's way above ambient temperature.

Secondly, it would be cool to be able to pump and store smoke or pipe it to smokestacks for emission as pollution in a controlled location, but a 'waste' resource like this can just be pumped into storage tanks and the storage tanks destroyed and all the pollution would disappear. Any ideas for making a player have to deal with a 'waste' fluid or would it have to be solid waste?

[FreeER]

a more complex energy system

...this is about the the third one I've seen in as many days, unfortunately it's not particularly straightforward to implement.

but a fluid with a max temperature much higher than water does not seem to add that much efficiency to the steam engine

I haven't tried this myself so I'm not sure the reasons but I read a comment here that said that you could modify the water fluid to work around this...

Any ideas for making a player have to deal with a 'waste' fluid or would it have to be solid waste?

The only way to do so currently would be to create a generator that did not produce emissions in the prototype (or modify the base one) and instead handle it manually in control.lua (check if player has a nearby waste storage/collector and if so place the waste there, otherwise emit the pollution normally using game.pollute).
edit: oops, didn't finish reading that last part lol. To prevent the 'destroy to eliminate pollution' you'd need to use onentitydied to pollute that position based on the amount of fluid/waste that was in the storage (it's possible that you'd need to use a glob table to keep track of the amount in the storage...not sure if you'd be able to access that data in onentitydied but I think you can).