Very low petroleum gas flow hinder plastic production

[Bond]

IMAGE : http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/101727694607293407/04999E1C57239528126EF940136A76A49A52E8C4/

I bought the game 2 days ago and this is my first run.

I am not producing plastic any more because there's no petroleum gas at the input. I'm making sure that the other 2 outputs (light and heavy oil) are being consumed, as it can be seen in the storage tanks almost drained.

I've even added a second refinery, but it seems to not receive enough input, as only the first one is burning petroleum (as seen in the pic).

The only factories using petroleum gas are three plastic factories and 4 sulfur factories (which produce some sulfur, but not that much, but that is not affecting my factory throughput).

Any tips?

[Zackmar]

You should get more oil, really. Use trains to bring it in and assembling machines to empty the barrels.

Or you could crack light oil into petroleum, although I usually prefer to get more oil as a whole.

[fractalgem]

Second cracking oil. You've actually got quite a few pumps, but turning all of your heavy and light oil into solid fuel is kinda wasteful, since you only need so much.

You might need to get more oil anyways if you've used up the windfall and they're at .1 oil/second.

[Josh Franco]

That's one thing I find annoying, oil is the hardest resource to gather in my opinion. There's just not enough oil in the few patches it generates. Even on max everything, there's plenty of them, but I only seem to see around 80% yield on the patches.

As far as tips go, like Captain and fractalgem have mentionned, you could crack heavy to light to petroleum and build more oil outposts.

If you need tips about oil cracking and outposts, I'd be happy to explain how to proceed to the best of my knowledge.

[Nellvan]

You need to research advanced oil processing, then it'll be much better. Until you get used to it, oil's just gonna be a mess (might still be after, but at least you know what you want to do) :).

Research advanced oil processing asap, to use that cracking the others have mentioned. Can't do much without it.
- then change the refinery to use the new advanced proccessing.
- the best ratio for petroleum is 4 refineries, 1 chem.plant cracking heavy to light, 7 chem plants cracking light to petrol (using adv. processing in the refineries)
-you may want to draw other stuff from that at least sometimes though, so now's the perfect opportunity to try the circuit network stuff. You can setup things like only cracking heavy oil when you have enough lubricant, and trying to balance light oil and gas and keeping abit of solid fuel around..

[Warlord]

Keep in mind the work speed of refineries. It takes 5 seconds to make 4 petroleum gas in one refinery (on standard oil processing). Plastic needs 3 per second. So to even run a single plastics factory fast enough, you need almost 4 refineries making petroleum, and all of it has to go to plastics.

To improve your petroleum gas production, research adv. oil processing, and change your refinery recipes over to that new recipe. They need water, which is more fun pipe logistics, but produces more petroleum per. The research also enables you to "downgrade" heavy and light oil to petroleum, which is good since those 2 products are rarely used.

So what you need to do is make more gas, which means make more refineries, which means make more oil. The key to fixing a product's throughput issue is to work your way up the production line, finding where the throttle is and fixing that. I run 20 refineries, and if I even had enough oil production, that many refineries would not keep up with my plastics production going full blast.

[KatherineOfSky]

The best thing to do is tap as many oil fields as possible. When the patches are depleted, insert Speed 3 modules in the pumpjacks and in beacons around the oil patches. This will boost production significantly.

I have a video about how to automatically control cracking with combinators here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJbqdZTQC7o&list=PL4o6UvJIdPNpm9szThfI-2y3Bv0c3rPlB