Factorio Forums

I'm having a nightmare trying to get plastic and batteries manufactured (for blue beakers) because I don't seem to be getting more than a dribble of petroleum gas out of my oil refinery. I set up three pump jacks with a tank, then refinery connected to one sulphur (leading to battery) and another two turning then heavy and light into solid fuel (just to keep the refinery going).

The problem is if I try to connect the gas feed to a plastics plant it gets no gas at all, it's all eaten up by the sulfur which itself looks to be only going about 50% capacity

So..is it WAD that one oil refinery can only produce 50% of the gas needed to run one chemical plant producing either plastic of batteries etc so that you need two oil refineries for every chemical plant using petroleum gas?

(BTW I know you can convert heavy and light oil to gas but you need refining 2 for that which needs blue beakers which need plastic and batteries........Grrrr)

One Oil refinery is definitely not enough for large quantities, but I also think you should look at the input. You only have 3 pump jacks, which after a while will only make 0.1/s each. Making 0.3s total, this is nowhere near enough for a good stream of the black stuff. So I'd try to expand the pumping operations first

I've rebuilt everything around 2 oil refineries and these seem enough to get one plastics and one battery factory at least reasonably functional

I have to say you seem to get a measly amount of petroleum gas out of a refinery. It seems wrong to me that one refinery can only supply one factory with it.

The OP mentions that he doesn't have the 'refining 2' tech yet. That one not only unlocks the cracking, but also the advanced oil processing. Using that you get much more petroleum per refinery cycle already.

The next step is modules which can also extend the time that you can last with 2 refineries. And tbh, I'm still using only two with my post rocket-defense base. I was more often crude oil constrained than having the refineries a bottleneck.


Oh, one more thing, if you limit the amount of sulfur made / don't have too large sulfuric acid storage capacity that will save a lot on resources spent there. Alternatively you can do things with the smart inserters, and / or use a pump setup so that the sulfuric acid only gets made from petroleum overflow.