Oil processing setup and ratios

[Drevin]

I'm a beginner on my first serious factory playthrough, and I've just bumped into the advanced oil processing. I found out that the near optimal setup from refining to cracking is 8:2:7. But I'm now also finding out that I can use heavy oil to produce lubricant. Can someone tell me if/how this messes with the above ratio? Does it matter? For 8 refineries is 2 lubricant plants enough? Or, better yet, for 10 refineries, since actually I already built 10 refineries before arriving to the advanced processing part of the game. I assume the extra 2 refineries would just go idle from time to time and it's better to have them on, rather that destroy them? Would the extra 2 mess up with a very delicate balance?

Also, there's another thing I'm trying to wrap my brain around. Setting conditions for the pipes and the best way to place them, along with some storage tanks. Is overkill having too many tanks placed down to act as buffers? Should I place tanks before and after a chemical process? Where should I place the pumps? Basically, how much do I overdo it if I go with something like Refineries -> Pump -> Tank -> Pump -> Cracking -> Pump -> Tank -> Pump -> Other cracking, and so on. Where should I place tanks and pipes and in which order?

I guess I could find out by myself through trial and error, but I'd rather focus on the layout of the oil processing setup if I would already know how many chemical plants to use and where to place pumps and tanks in the processing line. Otherwise I might over do it just to be safe, or under do it and realize the mistake a very long time in the future when I am building stuff I don't even realize now they exist.

Thank you.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Hedning:

If you actually analyze the coal liquefaction recipe you will find that it does not net consume heavy oil.

Making solid fuel from heavy is possible with the normal recipe too, but in both cases light oil is more efficient.

Regular oil processing is also deadlock free, you just need the cracking capacity. You need cracking both for coal liquefaction and for regular oil processing, there's no difference.

You can crack everything to petroleum gas and create solid fuel from that to feed the boilers for steam for liquefaction and let it flow on to create plastic. But you then need to balance it so your plastic doesn't over-consume and causes fuel to under-produce and steam to halt; which would break the production loop.

You can crack heavy oil to light oil and use light oil to solid fuel to feed the boilers for the steam, but that means you have to use circuitry and pumps to balance out how much light oil goes into fuel vs how much goes on into cracking into petroleum gas and is forwarded to plastic.

Or you can take the heavy oil into solid fuel which from the perspective of the refineries feeds the boilers at a near-exact production-to-consumption ratio to keep the loop going; crack all the light oil into petroleum gas; join it with the gas flowing out of the refineries and not have to balance everything with circuitry.

Gee; I wonder which is the better idea here if you're looking to set up a reliable, easy to deploy plastic build based on mass-munging coal. Could it be the one that is in no danger of stalling and doesn't require circuitry to manage?

[PhoenixFury]

Balancing oil with circuitry isn't difficult once you know how circuits work, though, and the pumps will handle the ratios in perpetuity. I haven't had my setup back up yet, and I simply ignore liquefaction entirely.

Not even sure what it's useful for, honestly, but thanks for the idea.

[Hedning]

Originally posted by RiO:

Gee; I wonder which is the better idea here if you're looking to set up a reliable, easy to deploy plastic build based on mass-munging coal. Could it be the one that is in no danger of stalling and doesn't require circuitry to manage?

Stalling and circuitry has nothing to do with which refinery recipe you are using. I promise you you haven't found anything that invalidates the fact that the main use of heavy oil in this game is for lubricant.

Thousands of players manage oil processing, turning heavy into lubricant, light into rocket fuel and petrol into sulfur and plastic without stalling. It isn't complicated and there's really no secret to it.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Hedning:

Originally posted by RiO:

Gee; I wonder which is the better idea here if you're looking to set up a reliable, easy to deploy plastic build based on mass-munging coal. Could it be the one that is in no danger of stalling and doesn't require circuitry to manage?

Stalling and circuitry has nothing to do with which refinery recipe you are using. I promise you you haven't found anything that invalidates the fact that the main use of heavy oil in this game is for lubricant.

Thousands of players manage oil processing, turning heavy into lubricant, light into rocket fuel and petrol into sulfur and plastic without stalling. It isn't complicated and there's really no secret to it.

And I'm not denying any of that.

What I am denying is that,

Originally posted by Poppy:

The only thing heavy oil is really used for anymore IS lubricant.

Because heavy oil still has a place going into solid fuel (and on into steam) for the coal liquefaction recipe to set up an easy sustainable loop for mass coal -> plastic production.

Can you balance oil products with circuitry? Of course, you can.
Is it more efficient to do so for that particular use-case, than it is to rely on the (uncannily accurate) ratio for heavy oil?

That depends on how you define efficiency. Certainly, it's not more efficient space-wise which can be important if you constrain your builds to a fixed city block pattern. And you can be pretty sure of the fact that it's also not more efficient UPS-wise, as circuitry is relatively expensive. Especially circuitry used for self-balancing, where the conditions flip-flop every frame and no amount of caching evaluations for stable states can be used to optimize it.

[Hedning]

First of all I tested your theory about the "uncanny" ratio, and it was false. Converting to solid fuel does not eat up all excess heavy oil. Here's the proof:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2285050528

Though even if it was a perfect ratio you have the coal right there, so you might as well feed the boiler with the coal and crack the heavy for more solid fuel and more petroleum, or feed the boiler with rocket fuel, which is probably more coal efficient.

Also the circuitry you might have to control eg the on/off pump for light oil cracking is just a pump connected with a wire to a liquid tank. That is not ups unfriendly. And as fluid systems go it is possible although quite tricky to make the fluid go the way you want without using circuitry: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2285060077 (disclaimer: I don't know the rules, it seems to have to do with placement order)

Finally by not making any rocket fuel or lubricant you have just pushed the need for controlled fluid flow elsewhere because I assume you still want blue belts? You still want robots and yellow science? You still want to send rockets? If you make all of your plastic in one place and don't save any heavy or light you may have trouble using up your petroleum in another and then you'll have to turn petroleum into solid fuel and it all gets really messy.

His statement is true. If you want to use heavy oil for solid fuel that's fine, you can if you want. You can make petroleum into solid fuel too. His statement did not say you cannot use heavy oil for solid fuel.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Hedning:

First of all I tested your theory about the "uncanny" ratio, and it was false. Converting to solid fuel does not eat up all excess heavy oil. Here's the proof

If you want a run-down of the full recipe's components, fine:

4 fully beaconed and moduled refineries take ~44 coal/s i.e. one blue belt. They can be fed with steam by 4 boilers and feed their output heavy oil back in.

Using beaconed and moduled chemical plants, the heavy oil flows into 4 heavy-to-light cracking and, iirc, 6 or 7 light-to-petroleum cracking, into which also the light oil from the refineries flows. This leaves exactly enough non-consumed heavy oil to push into one final heavy-to-solid-fuel plant that is capable of keeping up with and fueling the boilers.

Nilaus went crazy with the ratios in that idea and built something out of it with carefully planned fluid flow to prioritize the flow back into the refineries and into the solid fuel so that it balances naturally, without needing pumps or circuitry. And he made it tileable. It's part of his master class videos, if you want to look it up. It proves that the idea is sound and works.


The nice part of such a set-up is that it only requires coal as input; and only produces gas as output. Everything else is part of a closed system which isn't meant for 'outside' consumption. But, coal + gas is what makes plastic so run more lines of coal and you can consume them together with the produced gas to make heaps and heaps of plastic.

This allows you to isolate part of the oil related industry and break it up into distinct units of work, without needing to clump it all together and share a pipe system.

Originally posted by Hedning:

Finally by not making any rocket fuel or lubricant you have just pushed the need for controlled fluid flow elsewhere because I assume you still want blue belts? You still want robots and yellow science? You still want to send rockets?

Setting up liquefaction in one way does not preclude you from using a circuit-switched general purpose oil setup elsewhere. You don't have to connected the pipe systems for it together.

Originally posted by Hedning:

If you make all of your plastic in one place and don't save any heavy or light you may have trouble using up your petroleum in another and then you'll have to turn petroleum into solid fuel and it all gets really messy.

And for this you can work out a setup where rocket fuel is produced with both petroleum and light oil, using up excesses.

[Hedning]

Originally posted by RiO:

the heavy oil flows into 4 heavy-to-light cracking

If you are using heavy to light cracking then why have you been pretending that you don't. That was the whole point with your amazing ratio that it didn't need heavy cracking, that you could turn the light into petroleum and not balance the heavy because it was such a perfect ratio with just the fuel for the boilers.

With cracking of course the ratios are perfect. That's what cracking is for: to balance the imperfect ratios. You use heavy cracking to balance. I use heavy cracking to balance. It's exactly the same. This also means that your entire argument about circuits falls apart too, because if you can balance the flow between cracking and not cracking without circuits then so can I.

Originally posted by RiO:

Originally posted by Hedning:

then you'll have to turn petroleum into solid fuel and it all gets really messy.

And for this you can work out a setup where rocket fuel is produced with both petroleum and light oil, using up excesses.

Yes, exactly what I said, you have to turn gas into solid fuel, wasting even more potential. This is not an efficient way of doing things, first cracking the light at one location and then having to use gas for rocket fuel at another because you don't have enough light. And just so you can say that you used heavy oil for solid fuel which isn't even efficient to begin with. If you need two locations (which you might super late game) how about using a train?

[astrosha]

40 HO gets you 30 LO gets you 20 PG gets you 2 Plastic.

Since that 40 HO gets you 2 SF, 20 PG gets you 1 SF, while 30 LO gets you 3 SF, why on Nauvis wouldn't you crack ALL the HO to LO and then make just enough SF and crack the rest of the LO to PG for Plastic and just be done with it?????

Even if you add in modules and beacons, it does not change the 20 HO/PG cost per SF and the 10 LO cost per SF. All that does is give you more HO, LO, and PG to play with. Set it up such that you crack all the HO to LO, and en route to cracking Lo to PG your LO goes through the SF makers so that that belt backs up and then crack all the LO to PG for Plastic. Its not hard, no reason to make it sound harder than it is.

[Hedning]

Not all HO since you also need lubricant, like what was said earlier: HO is really only used for lubricant, the rest is cracked.

[astrosha]

Originally posted by Hedning:

Not all HO since you also need lubricant, like what was said earlier: HO is really only used for lubricant, the rest is cracked.

Lube was part of the initial question, with Advanced Oil Processing.

I was responding to the later conversation, which seemed to be more about Coal Liquifaction for the express purpose of making Plastic. sorry if I misread the thread.

[Hedning]

No, that's fine. I get that no one wants to read all this. I was just clarifying so that other people here doesn't misunderstand. The discussion about coal liquefaction stems from the claim that heavy oil is "really only used for lubricant". Coal liquefaction was then used as an example where the person would use heavy oil for solid fuel.