2 refineries can't satisfy more than 1 chem plant

[PollutionIsPower]

hi there! first time posting, love the game but have a gameplay problem i'm struggling to figure out.

i have several oil fields under my control (some far, some very very close) which go into two refineries. i don't have anything except vanilla oil tech (its my first run getting this deep into the game and blue science is very hard!)

is the chemical plants in the south , the pipes leading off to the right take the gas over to battery production

Here's the plastic production. Above this there's two more chemical plants producing batteries, but my battery line is not moving so nothing is actually being produced[EDIT: to clarify why - its because i store resources only on belts, so the batteries produce fine, its just my belt is full so no sulfur or anything is being used so nothing more is being produced]. The north chemical plant here gets all the petroleum which turns into plastic working at full speed, while the southern one gets petroleum at a rate so slow it might not be there.

I first thought it was a problem with the amount of oil i was processing, so tripled my amount of oil production including clearing out some alien bases, but while that maxed my refinery production out nothing changed for my petroleum gas --> plastic situation.

i would love some advice on the fluid management

[DaveMcW]

That's correct, plastics and sulfur consume a huge amount of petroleum gas. You need 4.7 refineries to supply one chemical plant.

After you get advanced oil processing and crack everything into petroleum gas, you can reduce it to 2 refineries per chemical plant.

[solntcev]

Small note: you don't need 2 petroleum gas inputs on chemical plant, 1 is enough.

[Hannu]

In my opinion advanced oil processing should be the first goal after unlocking basic oil processing. I use always 1 refinery and 1 plastic and sulfur plants in that phase just to produce everything needed for blue science and advanced processing. After that I make a large overhaul and expansion in my refinery area and begin to increase gas production. It works best in normal games but if you have something special, like reduced resources, speedrun, maximum enemies, there may be good reasons to research something else before advanced oil.

[PollutionIsPower]

thanks for the responses everyone!

i had no clue i needed that much petroleum! time to learn trains more in depth and get some oil trains going in that case

thanks Hannu! it definitely seems like i need to rush for it to get access to cracking and all that to increase my petroleum production. i really don't need all this heavy and light oil! (I don't even know what i need them for, im a 'cross the bridge as i come to it' style play because i'm going through mostly blind)

[Deadly-Bagel]

Not a lot... Heavy oil is needed for lubricant which is used in electric engines (bots, pumps, etc) and the fastest type of belt. I can't even think of anything that specifically uses only light oil. Flamethrower ammo uses both heavy and light, and while solid fuel (and now ammo for flamethrower turrets) can use either light or heavy oil it's much more efficient to use light oil.

So you rush advanced oil processing and set that on your refineries, then to start with you just crack everything into petroleum and later on you can make pumps to manage your oils - I usually set up a pump to heavy oil cracking to only work if there is more heavy than light oil, and the same for light oil cracking if there is more than half light oil than petroleum. Limiting your lubricant and sulphuric acid production to 500 (by putting pumps on the input and connecting with green wires to the relevant storage tank) you can reduce the amount of oil tied up in those products (especially if you use an efficient 5 sulphur > 2 sulphuric acid chem plant setup, as each chemical plant holds 50 sulphur before stopping production).