Factorio Forums

Can someone please let me know what I'm doing wrong here? Oil refinery halts quickly, can't get basic plastic happening.
Thanks in advance,

h

Your heavy oil pipe is contaminated, destroy and rebuild it.

Light oil in heavy oil pipe.

Also, after you fix the contamination problem your production will halt once one of your oil tanks fill up.

Oil processing takes time to fully understand, so here are a few options:

Simplest: Keep adding oil tanks to keep them from filling up and stalling your refineries.

Simple: Covert excess light and heavy oil to solid fuel and stash it in an array of chests. Use some of it for your trains and the rest you will eventually convert to rocket fuel. You can use a simple circuit condition on a pump wired to your tanks so that you only convert once the tanks are at least 3/4 full.

The real goal: Study various tutorial of oil processing to gain an understanding of the various nuances. Then...
- Crack heavy oil to make lubricant... up to the point where your lubricant tank is almost full.
- Crack the rest of the heavy oil to light oil.
- Crack as much light oil as you need to Petroleum Gas.
- Turn the rest of your excess light oil to Solid Fuel.
- Turn Solid Fuel to Rocket Fuel.
- Make Sulphur from Petroleum Gas.
- Make Sulfuric Acid from Sulphur.
- Make Explosives from Sulphur.
- Use some of your oil to make flamethrower ammo.
- Use some of the Rocket Fuel to make Nuclear Fuel for trains.
And of course, learn circuit logic to make all of the above happen automatically regardless of what you might be consuming at any time, so that things don't stall.

Things like robots, solar tech, Artillery ammo, etc will consume those things.