Problem with heavy oil

[factoriobiker]

I need some heavy oil to make lubricant for fastest blue belts.....

I have 8 pumpjacks, then 3 oil rafineries to make petroleum gas and 1 rafinery to make heavy oil, light oil and petroleum gas

but I make lubricant from heavy oil but it is not enough.....I dont know why?

Should I replace 3 rafineries with advanced oil rafineries? so I get side products? Is that the point?

[Serenity]

Use only advanced oil processing + cracking. That gets you much more materials. Then control the cracking with the circuit network. Put a pump at the input of the heavy oil cracking plants. Then connect a single tank of lubricant to the pump via circuit wire. Set the pump to be active when lubricant > 24000. Now you will produce lubricant, but if you have enough the heavy oil will be cracked to light oil

[Yoyobuae]

Advanced oil processing produces three products:

• Heavy oil
• Light oil
• Petroleum gas

You need to make use of all three in order to keep the refinery going. The simplest solution is to place a bunch of storage tanks for each of the three products. This will eventually get out of hand though with you having to place more and more storage tanks (or having to manually flush full storage tanks).

The smarter solution is to setup oil cracking or solid fuel chem plants. These will help in getting rid of oil products you don't need and put them to use elsewhere.

But if you really need a lot of lubricant, then the ultimate solution is to setup Coal Liquefaction. This generates the greatest amount of heavy oil out of the three oil refinery processes.

[Koub]

My preferred way to make lubricant is with coal liquefaction. It's trickier to setup, but one can build a lube production facility that can't deadlock once kickstarted, because with the light and petroleum, one can produce fuel to make the steam, and power the facility, which can then be 100% autonomous (as long as provided with water and coal).

Bue if you don't want to use it, then I suggest you turn all your refineries to advanced oil processing.
You can then have more heavy oil for your lubricant, and when your lubricant output storage is above a certain level, you can change the flow of your oil plant with pumps and conditions to send the excess heavyoil to cracking into light (which can eventually be cracked for petroleum too if needed).

That's the most flexible setup possible.

[moderated by boskid: topic from imposter that copied first message was merged with this topic, all posts were moved starting from this one]

[valneq]

Should I replace 3 rafineries with advanced oil rafineries? so I get side products? Is that the point?

I highly recommend to use advanced oil refining as much as you can: The total output of petrochemical products is just much larger than with basic oil processing. Remember that you can always use cracking from heavy oil to light oil and from light oil to petroleum gas. With a high demand of sulfur/sulfuric acid and plastic for science, the by-products are unlikely to deadlock.

[Impatient]

check this:

https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html

it will help you a lot to learn how much of what to make

[astroshak]

4 Refineries?

3 Basic Oil Processing (BOP) produce 27 Petroleum Gas/second.
1 Advanced Oil Processing (AOP) produces 5 Heavy Oil/second, 9 Light Oil/second, 11 Petroleum Gas/second.

Switching the three BOP to AOP would get you a grand total of 20 Heavy Oil/second, 36 Light Oil/second, 44 Petroleum Gas/second. Say you don’t need any Heavy Oil or Light Oil? Cracking them down turns 40 Heavy Oil into 30 Light Oil every 2 seconds (20->15 per second), and 30 Light Oil into 20 Petroleum Gas every 2 seconds (15->10 per second). This means you are producing about 78 Petroleum Gas/second.

The only circumstance where BOP is better than AOP is when AOP is not yet researched. In every other circumstance, AOP is better, and should be used.

Coal Liquifaction is skewed the other way; it produces more Heavy Oil than Light, and more Light Oil than Petroleum Gas. Because it makes so much more Heavy Oil, it is a viable option when you need more Heavy Oil, which would be for Lubricant production (since Lube is the only unique product for the Heavy Oil, the only other reasonable thing to do with it is crack it down to Light Oil). So as was suggested above, consider setting up a plant just for that.

[jodokus31]

You need a lot of heavy oil for blue belts.

I would propose to switch to Advanced Oil Processing and keep researching and/or produce modules.
While researching or producing modules, you consume more petroleum compared to the use of heavy oil.
Solid fuel, mainly from fuel oil, is also good for power and rocket fuel

Also consider, where you really need blue belts, as they are extremely expensive compared to their gain.

[Serenity]

Also use circuit control on your oil cracking plants once you switch to advanced oil processing. Turn off the supply of heavy oil to the HO crackers if you are short on lubricant. That way it gets priority.

Also consider, where you really need blue belts, as they are extremely expensive compared to their gain.

That. Don't be fooled by some YouTubers who build everything with blue belt once they become available. You can launch a rocket with mostly yellow and red belts. Blue belt only becomes an absolute necessity for beaconed builds.

[astroshak]

Also use circuit control on your oil cracking plants once you switch to advanced oil processing. Turn off the supply of heavy oil to the HO crackers if you are short on lubricant.

I take the opposite approach, but either way works.

I have the refineries output to storage tanks, and I always have the pump on that goes to the lube makers. It’s only when I have an excess of heavy oil that I turn the pump on sending some to be cracked to light oil.

I figure the “only” product that can be made with heavy oil is lube, or it can be converted to light oil. So make all the lube you can before turning the rest into light oil. Same thing really with light oil, make its two products (solid fuel and rocket fuel) and only after those convert excess to petroleum gas. While any of of the three crude products can be turned into solid fuel, it is optimal to produce it from light oil.

[Serenity]

I take the opposite approach, but either way works.

It's not really opposite IMO. You can either control the input or the output of something. I proposed a circuit control pump of an input of the cracking plants. You put it at the output. I think I've used both at various times. Doesn't make a difference in this case except maybe a little buffer in the chemical plants

[MassiveDynamic]

Here is what the WIKI says about oil production...

I like the 8:2:7 ratio best for my normal base structure.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Oil_processing

"Petroleum gas production

For producing petroleum gas, the optimal advanced oil processing ratio is 20:5:17 (advanced oil processing : heavy oil cracking : light oil cracking), and 8:2:7 is close enough. Using coal liquefaction, the ratio is 60:39:55 (coal liquefaction : heavy oil cracking : light oil cracking), and 12:8:11 is close enough.

One refinery running basic oil processing produces 9 petroleum gas per second. One refinery running advanced oil processing combined with one of each oil cracking chemical plant produces 19.5 petroleum gas per second in total. One refinery running coal liquefaction combined with one of each oil cracking chemical plant produces close to 11.2 petroleum gas per second in total (taking into consideration the recycling of the heavy oil).

The refining can be sped up with modules; to prevent jams or inactive buildings it is recommended to speed everything up evenly. When slowing the process down (by using productivity modules) you are better off experimenting on altering the ratio or the speed on certain buildings, since the default ratios given above only hold if all the structures involved run at the same speed and have 100% productivity (in other words, no bonuses). "