Stuck at lubricant production

[Quax]

I'm really stuck at provideing lubricant, currently especially for my flying robot frame factory. I basically now how to produce lubricant, but I'm alwas reaching a kind of dead end because I cannot make use of the surplus products (light pil and petroleum gas). I started to produce solid fuel from them, and I as well need petroleum gas for the production of the advanced circuit, but the demand for both of them is too low. So my lubricant production regularly stops due to the light oil / petroleum gas tanks beeing full, thus stopping the process.

I wonder how you have overcome this problem?

[DaveMcW]

Set up cracking to turn light oil into petroleum gas.

Turn petroleum gas into plastic.

Store all the plastic, you WILL need it.

[Serenity]

The oil chain is almost exclusively about turning oil into gas. Everything else is a side product. So you produce lube and the excess heavy oil gets cracked. You do need that plastic eventually as your circuit production expands. Do more yellow research and start launching rockets and your plastic will be consumed. Module 3s are also a huge resource sink for circuits.

If you need a huge amount of lube consider oil liquefaction. It produces a lot more heavy oil.

[astroshak]

Burn the solid fuel. A full yellow belt of the stuff can feed 100 Boilers. Also, you can use it instead of coal in your smelting columns.

I usually set up HO, LO, PG from the refineries to go into their own separate Tanks. Pump from the HO tank goes to Lube production. Another Pump, set to operate only when HO > a specified amount, I set it for 20,000, heads to HO->LO cracking.

LO from cracking goes into the same LO tank that the refineries pump to. Similar to HO, I have a pump (always on) going to SF production. A conditional Pump, LO > 20,000, sends LO to LO->PG cracking.

PG from cracking goes into the same tank that the refineries pump to. From there, a pump goes to Plastic and Sulfur production. A conditional pump goes to SF production, to make SF from PG if I’ve too much PG. SF from PG has a higher priority for burning than SF from LO.

[quyxkh]

I run one wire through the three tanks and the two pumps feeding the crackers, crack heavy when heavy > light, crack light when light > gas.

It's basically never bad to stockpile rocket fuel and P3/S3 modules.

[Quax]

Hmmm.. for me this feels like running through a maze and never reaching the exit. All I want to do is thave more robots. So I need to produce plastic to get rid of the petroleum gas. Now I have to either build warehouse after warehouse to stockpile plastic, or build advanced circuits. Which in turn I need to stockpile, OR build something that calls for advanced circuits ... so I'm building al lot of things that I actually dont want to build instead of simply increasing my robot fleet.

[astroshak]

Pretty much, yes. Since Advanced Oil Processing and Coal Liquifaction both produce three fluids, and if any one of them backs up, production of all three stops, you need to actually do something with the other two.

ALL you want is Lube? Start up Coal Liquifaction. You get more HO that way than you do from AOP. But, you still need to do something with the LO and PG. As you have surmised, you can really only store so much of the stuff.

LO has three uses : Solid Fuel, Rocket Fuel, and turning into PG.
PG has three uses : Sulfur, Plastic, Solid Fuel.

You do need some Sulfur to make the Sulfuric Acid used in the robots. You also need some Plastic for the Advanced Circuits used to make one kind of robot. You also need to burn some fuel to make the Steam for the Coal Liquifaction.

Unfortunately, I don’t think you need to burn enough fuel, or to produce enough sulfur/plastic, to consume all of the LO/PG produced by CL. So, you need to find something else to do with them ...

Have fun!

[Serenity]

It's arguably a bit of a design flaw. I wished oil were less about gas. But what's the issue with doing yellow science? It needs lot of copper, which can be an issue in the short term, but there is lots of good research there. The logistic system for example. And robots work a lot better with some robot speed. That's a good resource sink for a while.

Otherwise, yes coal liquefaction. It's not just for oil shortages. Look at the numbers:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Oil_processing

AOP gives you 25 HO. CL gives you 90! And far less LO and gas

[Zavian]

How many bots do you need? If you think you need more than 3000-4000 then you are probably designing your base in a very ups inefficent manner.

My current base has 400 logistics robots, and 200-300 construction bots, and produces 400-500 science/minute depending on what I'm researching. (I'm in the process of clearing more territory and building more outposts to gradually increase that to 1500/minute).

Just keep research running at 45-90 science per minute and you will use plenty of plastic/petroleum (and once you start with space science light oil/rocket fuel as well), leaving you with plenty of heavy oil for lube.

But even if you want to only build bot frames, battery production alone uses more than enough petroleum to provide enough heavy oil for lube for the electric engines.

Assuming no productivity modules, each robot frames needs 60 petrol for battery production. Every 3 seconds each refinery produces 15 heavy oil (advanced oil production, no beacons or modules), which equals the 15 lube required for one robot frame, plus 27 light oil and 33 petrol. The 27 light oil cracks to another 18 petrol. So that is the lube for one robot frame, but only 51 out of the 60 petrol required for the batteries.

If you are only building robot frames, you should have excess heavy oil production, which you will probably need to crack. (Again, assuming no productivity modules. If you have productivity modules everywhere, they increase the sulfur + acid + batteries you get from petrol by 2.197 times, but lube by only 1.3 times, so you will need another sink for light oil and/or petrol. But a small amount of science production should be an adequate sink for a reasonable number of bot frames/minute).

[Project2100]

I'm really stuck at provideing lubricant, currently especially for my flying robot frame factory. I basically now how to produce lubricant, but I'm alwas reaching a kind of dead end because I cannot make use of the surplus products (light pil and petroleum gas). I started to produce solid fuel from them, and I as well need petroleum gas for the production of the advanced circuit, but the demand for both of them is too low. So my lubricant production regularly stops due to the light oil / petroleum gas tanks beeing full, thus stopping the process.

I wonder how you have overcome this problem?

Funnily enough, I had the opposite problem when reaching chemical processing the first time: the excess HO I had was preventing LO and PG production

Anyways, I second astroshak's suggestion of converting any liquid fuel into solid fuel, as it can be very simple to implement, disregarding efficiencies.

And if you ever have the doubt of your base not able to consume all the surplus power, then start (ab)using laser turrets and beacons. Those things drain power like crazy.

[Spaghettificator]

You can do a simple logic system to automatically crack when the storage tank for the especific fluid is full, and stop cracking when not.
I'm not in front of my PC but if i remember correctly, you connect each fluid from the refinery to 2 pumps side by side, both pumps conected to the respective storage tank by a logic wire. Setup the one pump conected with pipe to the tank with the condition to enable when FLUID TYPE <= 20k.
The other pump connect the pipe to the cracking setup and set it for FLUID TYPE > 20k.
By putting one pump with lower/greater or equal you avoid both pumps trickle unecessary.
You can do this for all over your oil setup.

[orzelek]

You can do a simple logic system to automatically crack when the storage tank for the especific fluid is full, and stop cracking when not.
I'm not in front of my PC but if i remember correctly, you connect each fluid from the refinery to 2 pumps side by side, both pumps conected to the respective storage tank by a logic wire. Setup the one pump conected with pipe to the tank with the condition to enable when FLUID TYPE <= 20k.
The other pump connect the pipe to the cracking setup and set it for FLUID TYPE > 20k.
By putting one pump with lower/greater or equal you avoid both pumps trickle unecessary.
You can do this for all over your oil setup.

One pump with condition above 20k is enough as long as it leads only to input of cracking facility for that oil.
So you cascade it like that:
Heavy oil tank -> pump > 20k -> heavy cracking to light -> Light oil tank
Light oil tank -> pump > 20k -> light cracking to gas -> Gas tank/s
And if you have a lot of surplus petroleum gas just store it. Plastic will eat a lot of that.

[Xeorm]

My general suggestion would be to look for products that use the ingredients you have extra of and see about making those, along with the thing you really want. Both solid fuel and plastic are heavily used in science production, so I'd suggest looking there first. You might also want to look into modules. Those take a lot of plastic too, and are good opportunities for increasing overall production.

Failing that, producing solid fuel and plastic (especially plastic) in large quantities should be easy if you have plenty of logistic bots, so I'd do that as well. Solid fuel can also be used in energy production. If you want to too, store the unused oils in storage. Get a good amount of storage. If you max out, pick them up or have bots pick them up and then replace them for easy removal of lots of oil.

[MEOWMI]

You need red circuits to produce roboports, which are needed for robots anyways, especially if you're making enormous amounts of robots! So I would go about automating production of those. And as was already mentioned, you can't have too big of a stash of plastics or red circuits.