Factorio Forums

If an oil patch is depleted, and assuming that:

- Powering it is not a problem, and
- There are no biters in range of the pollution it generates, and
- Oil demand is being satisfied overall

Is there any other reason not to continue using depleted oil patches forever?

My general setup is picking up oil with trains, where each oil field has the same station name along with tanks to hold enough oil for a trainload, and then I only enable the station if the buffer tanks are full (so the trains just pick a station that's ready and I can glance at station name colors on the map to see if it's time to add another patch soon). It works well but I'm wondering if there's a reason to decommission depleted patches (or even care if they're depleted at all) under the above assumptions.

As even depleted oil patch powers itself, pollution might be the only reason.
So, short answer is no.

I agree, no reason not to keep pumping oil.

If you slap in 2 Eff2 modules even pollution is basically completely negligible. Eff1 does a good job as well and usually there's little reason not to use them.

Depleted oil patches still produce so much oil that in most of my playthroughs I don't even notice them depleting until much much later. Usually you also end up with a bunch of productivity bonuses so even depleted patches produce a lot of extra.