Advanced Oil Processing stops producing?

[jpinard]

I need to produce 2 things right now. Heavy oil for lubricant, and petroleum gas. But the light oil that comes out appears to stop all oil production since I have no where for it to go. Are the Oil Refineries working as intended? I guess I could add tanks to store Light oil in, but I think I'd be making those tanks to infinity taking up valuable real estate. What am I not understanding?

[Fel]

For starters, the majority of machines will stop accepting input (and as a result pause soon afterwards) when at least one of the output slots have more than a few cycles worth.
The output slot turns yellow when that happens and the mouse-over tooltip on the machine will also tell you about it.

In this case one of the outputs, light oil, is not able to be outputed to the pipes because they are already full, stopping the machine.

Adding more storage is a temporary solution while you work on making an automated one.


The solution are the "cracking" recipes or the solid fuel recipe that you unlocked at the same time as advanced oil processing (which is supposed to be a big hint that you will need it pretty much right away).
Solid fuel is something you are going to need and is a much better fuel than coal for most uses and light oil happens to be the most efficient of the three oil products when it comes to making it.

The cracking allows you to turn heavy oil into light oil as well as light oil into petroleum gas.
Usually you try to setup a way that turns surplus of heavy and light towards petroleum gas but at least for right now light oil to petroleum would help you solve your problem until either petroleum gas or heavy oil becomes the liquid that stops your refineries.

[Jupiter3927]

You have to do something with all your light oil.
It's pretty useful for fuel and an ingredient in rocket fuel.
You should also send excess light (and heavy) oil off to be cracked into petroleum gas.

[jpinard]

OK I'll do that.

@Fel I don't know if you have a common name, but I could swear you've helped me in some other games as well. If so, I'd like to say thanks!

[Bellatrix]

Here's what you should do:
Have a row of chemical plants that crack heavy oil to light oil which are all supplied by a single pump.
Have the same again but for cracking light oil to gas.
Also, have a tank each of heavy oil, light oil, and gas.

Using comparator modules, turn on the heavy oil cracking pump if you have less light oil than heavy oil in the tanks, and turn on the light oil cracking pump if you have less gas than light oil in the tanks.

What this system does is it keeps a balance of products.

[MechBFP]

Originally posted by Bellatrix:

Here's what you should do:
Have a row of chemical plants that crack heavy oil to light oil which are all supplied by a single pump.
Have the same again but for cracking light oil to gas.
Also, have a tank each of heavy oil, light oil, and gas.

Using comparator modules, turn on the heavy oil cracking pump if you have less light oil than heavy oil in the tanks, and turn on the light oil cracking pump if you have less gas than light oil in the tanks.

What this system does is it keeps a balance of products.

It’s easier to just use a power switch for each section instead of comparators. If gas is less than 20,000 then turn on light fracking, and if light oil is less than 20,000 then turn on heavy fracking.

[Danub]

Using power switches leaves you vulnerable to mistakes when building nearby. You could accidentally connect the cracking setup to the main grid, bypassing the switch. It's safer with pumps and you don't need any combinators for them. If you only need to set up a threshold value, you can hook up the pumps directly to the storage tanks, much like you do with the power switch.