Solution for dealing with excess oil (clogging up refineries)

[Furry Eskimo]

I'm working on a solution that might help you.

When my factories get HUGE, I often have too much oil. I process it, but eventually one of the tanks fills up, and everything shuts down! Very frustrating!

So, here's the easiest, best solution I have.


Step 1/3: (Heavy oil to light oil)
>Connect two pumps exiting your heavy oil reserve, to chemical plants that turn it into light oil.
>Using two wire, connect one pump to one of your heavy oil containers, and the other pump to one of your light oil containers.
>>Set the condition of the first pump to (Heavy oil) > ~23k (or your choice) = Enable
>>Set the second pump to (Light oil) < ~2k (or your choice) = Enable
*This will turn heavy oil into light oil, if you have too much heavy oil, or too little light oil.

Step 2/3: (Light oil to petroleum gas)
>Connect two pumps exiting your light oil reserve, to chemical plants that turn it into petroleum gas.
>Using two wire, connect one pump to one of your light oil containers, and the other pump to one of your petroleum gas containers.
>>Set the condition of the first pump to (Light oil) > ~23k (or your choice) = Enable
>>Set the second pump to (Petroleum gas) < ~2k (or your choice) = Enable
*This will turn light oil into petroleum gas, if you have too much light oil, or too little petroleum gas.


Step 3/3: (Dealing with excess petroleum gas)
>Connect one pump exiting your petroleum gas reserve, to a collection of empty storage tanks. (As many as you see fit.)
>>Connect one pump exiting these empty storage tanks, back to you petroleum gas reserve.
>Using two wire, connect both pumps to one of your petroleum gas containers. (It does not need to be the same petroleum container.)
>>Set the condition of the first pump to (Petroleum gas) > ~23k (or your choice) = Enable
>>Set the second pump to (Petroleum gas) < ~2k (or your choice) = Enable
*This will pump petroleum gas to the empty storage tanks, if you have too much petroleum gas. If you have too little petroleum gas, it will pump the excess petroleum gas back into your petroleum gas reserve.



Step 4/3: (Extra) (Alert if manual intervention is needed.)
>Place one programmable speaker by your empty tanks.
>Using one wire, connect one of the empty containers to the programmable speaker.
>>Set the condition of the programmable speaker to (Petroleum gas) > ~23k (or your choice) = Enable
>>Select an alert sound you can tolerate. I recommend Steel Drum D#3
>>Global playback will let you hear the sound from anywhere.
*This will cause an alarm to sound if your empty storage tanks are full, and need to be manually emptied.
**Warning: These tanks will fill up, as there is nothing telling the oil refineries to stop.

Step 5/3: (Extra) (Telling the oil refineries not to process excess crude oil.)
>Using as many wires as needed, connect your oil refineries together, and to one of your heavy oil containers.
>>Set the condition of each oil refinery to (Heavy oil) < ~23k (or your choice) = Enable
*This will turn your oil refineries on, if you have too little heavy oil.
**Warning: This is recommended, but I have not yet tested it for bugs.




Hope this helps!!

[Hammer Of Evil]

I think manual balancing actually works better, as by installing controls, refinery expansion is made more difficult and tedious.

And all of this can basically be avoided if the refinery could be set to 'burn' product that cannot be used/stored currently at a high pollution cost, thus allowing continual flow of other products, and stopping the burn after the product is demanded again, solving a snarl in production.

another option would be additional refinery methods where only a single product is produced instead of being stuck with 3 products, then you could use your 'regulator' method that you are using above with a very high efficiency.

And i mean.. there's only one type of generic 'pipe'. I wonder if different diameters (larger or smaller) having an effect on flow rate or volume would be considered. as we have 3 different types of belts requiring different resources, it follows that there would be 3 different diameters of pipeline, requiring different resources.

but i mean.. just a suggestion, not a solution by any means. its difficult to pin it down because of all the variables involved in the process, and for the factory it is designed for.

[astrosha]

Heavy Oil has three uses : Flamethrower Fuel, Lubricant, Solid Fuel. Of these, Lubricant and possible Flamethrower Fuel are the more important. It can also be converted to Light Oil.

Light Oil has two of those three uses : Flamethrower Fuel, and Solid Fuel. It can also be converted to Petroleum Gasoline.

Have one plant converting Heavy Oil into Lubricant. Also have a/some plants making Flamethrower Fuel, if you use Flamethrowers. Convert any excess Heavy into Light.

Considering the conversion costs (40 Heavy turns into 30 Light, which turns into 20 Petroleum), and the cost to make Solid Fuel, turn extra Light Oil into Solid Fuel and use that to feed your Trains, Car, Tank, Boilers, or even Furnaces if you're not using Electric Furnaces yet.

[Furry Eskimo]

You're not wrong Hammer, that would be an easier solution, and my suggestion does require space, but a large scale oil refinery set up takes space no matter what, and there is no way to dump fuel automattically, so this is my vanilla solution, which I think is pretty simple, It's basically just six pumps.
Also my solution ensure that whatever you do need, you'll have. This system won't drain you of all you heavy or light oil.

[MangoMan]

Originally posted by astrosha:

Petroleum Gasoline.

I could be wrong but I think "petroleum gas" is propane/butane, not gasoline.

[Warlord]

Originally posted by Sahuagin:

Originally posted by astrosha:

Petroleum Gasoline.

I could be wrong but I think "petroleum gas" is propane/butane, not gasoline.

That's what we (English) get for using the same term "gas" for something in a gaseous form and "gas" as in "gasoline" the liquid.

[The_Mell]

Originally posted by Furry Eskimo:

You're not wrong Hammer, that would be an easier solution, and my suggestion does require space, but a large scale oil refinery set up takes space no matter what, and there is no way to dump fuel automattically, so this is my vanilla solution, which I think is pretty simple, It's basically just six pumps.
Also my solution ensure that whatever you do need, you'll have. This system won't drain you of all you heavy or light oil.

If wasting resources by burning them isn't wrong, then i don't want to be right.
And if i can automate something in Factorio, why do it manually?


My basic setup works with just 2 pumps.
I have a dedicated store&control area with tanks of those 3 products more or less side by side.
Pumps are connected to 2 different tanks and just compare their levels. If heavy exceeds light, start cracking for example.

Further control can be achieved by just varying number of tanks for different products, for example 2 heavy but 4 light oil tanks.
After those store&control tanks there can be another storage area which would mean pumps for flow direction control.
Water can be used for control, too, instead of pumping the products.
And with some extra setup a single control line from there to refinery area could control flow by activating other control pumps - scaleable for megabases.

[Mike]

I use simple power switchin off the different parts based on buffer tanks

Heavy -> Light cracking when heavy is eg >15k in buffer the switch turns on the crackers (who is powered only through that switch)
Light -> Petrolium when light is say eg >15k in buffer the switch turns on the crackers (who is powered only through that switch)

And then i just make sure i have enough crackers to keep the balance from heavy->light->petroleum

Two switches = Minimum of wasted ups hit and as a "byproduct" absolute zero power when not running.

When im lazy i could even use the programable speakers to say (zero volume, display text) its time to build more crackers from the same buffers (Say heavy is >20k that means the heavy->light cracking isnt speedy enough)

[Hedning]

Since you are using more petroleum gas than the other two you don't need both a < and a > check. Since there is always excess heavy and light you can simply tell your crackers to only crack this excess.

Originally posted by Hammer of Evil:

I think manual balancing actually works better, as by installing controls, refinery expansion is made more difficult and tedious.

Absolutely not. Squeezing in 1 pump into each of your light and heavy pipes is very easy. You may want pumps anyway to help with flow.

[Navin]

Originally posted by Warlord:

Originally posted by Sahuagin:

I could be wrong but I think "petroleum gas" is propane/butane, not gasoline.

That's what we (English) get for using the same term "gas" for something in a gaseous form and "gas" as in "gasoline" the liquid.

In the UK we call it petrol instead of gasoline.

[GMC]

FWIW, my preferred solution to balancing is to crack whenever there's more of the input than the output. So heavy-to-light if there's more heavy oil than light oil, light-to-gas if there's more light oil than gas. That way, you only run out of one of them if you run out of all of them, and you only have full tanks if all three are full.

As for numbers, I just add "enough" cracking plants. If I notice that the numbers start to tilt in favour of the heavier fractions, I'll add a couple more plants. Using set ratios doesn't work when you're using the heavier fractions for specific purposes (i.e. heavy oil for lubricant, light oil for solid fuel) as well as for cracking.

[Ryan]

Bob's mods is handy. You can build Storage Tanks Mk4 which hold 100k of liquid. They are expensive but make it not too difficult to store millions. Go bigger with Bob's.

[Warlord]

Originally posted by Navin:

Originally posted by Warlord:

That's what we (English) get for using the same term "gas" for something in a gaseous form and "gas" as in "gasoline" the liquid.

In the UK we call it petrol instead of gasoline.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply I was speaking about the England English, but english speakers. As a brash American I, of course, assumed that English is used identically everywhere and simply referred to my language by its name.

Hey look, another quirk of our language is we use the same word for the language as the word referring to members of a particular country! yaaaaaaaaaaaay

[Furry Eskimo]

Sounds like many people have their own clever ways of managing their oil. A common idea seems to be to keep the levels of heavy and light oil the same. The reason I don't do this is because I want to maintain a minimum level of each oil, and if I run out of light out, I may subsequently run out of heavy oil.

I used to have priority oil tanks, that could not be cracked, and which supplied all my factories. I now have a better solution.

The pumps (which draw oil when the their level is too high) pull straight from the tanks, to be cracked.
When the other oil level is too low and the second pump activates, it must pass through a third pump, which is only enabled when the first oil type is above a minimum level. (This would be easier if I could give the second pump multiple manditory conditions, but I am not aware of a way to do this.)

[Hedning]

Originally posted by Furry Eskimo:

This would be easier if I could give the second pump multiple manditory conditions, but I am not aware of a way to do this.)

You can't. Placing pumps in series is how you create AND conditions, or use combinators.

3 pumps to control 1 type of cracking is definitely overkill though.

[SAura]

Dunno... I use following simple method:
- Pull wire to one tank of heavy oil, one tank of light oil and one tank of petrolem
- If "light oil" < "heavy oil" then convert heavy oil to light oil
- If "petroleum" < "light oil" then convert light oil to petroleum
Works like a charm.