Cooling with petroleum production?

[Blech]

Ok, so I have tried to create a heat-negative petroleum generation, but I can't get it to go heat-negative so it obviously didn't go so well. I will try to describe what I did, and then I hope that someone with way more experience with the game than me can tell me if it should work, and maybe what I'm doing wrong. Here goes:
I have two 7*7 insulated tanks with an aquatuner and a pump inside both. The first tank is for crude oil, which fills the tank while the pump extracts oil into two refineries. The refineries put petroleum in the second tank, which is drained and put into two petroleum generators.. The aquatuners are on a cooling-loop which cools down the refineries and the generators and dumps the heat into oil/petroleum. My idea was that since the refineries basically halfs the amount of oil, and petroleum and oil have similar heat properties, about half of the heat should be destroyed in flagrant disregard for the first law of thermodynamics :D Secondly, the petroleum generators produce less that half of volume of water, which has about twice the heat-density of petroleum, so screw that thermodynamics law a second time.

I thought the temperatures inside the tanks would stabilize at some point, but at this point the oil is at 85 degrees (piped in at 50) and the petroleum is at 97. Granted, it is very slow, and the machines are cool as ice, but I'm not quite seing the equilibrium i was hoping for.

So is this supposed to be possible? Did anyone make it work? What am i doing wrong? :D

Thanks you for any help.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

I have a few questions for your setup:

What is the temperature of the natural gas produced from refining the oil?

How many watts of power does it cost to refine the oil, and how many kDTU are produced making that power?

Have you taken into account how many kDTU are produced by the refinement?

How many kDTU are produced to make 1.2 kW of power for the aquatuner?

How many kDTU are lost to storage of your power? (This includes energy lost, because energy lost is roughly equivalent with how much energy is in a similar amount of kDTUs)

I've seen claims of heat negativity on the wiki for petroleum generators, even when using ethanol, but I also know that in the case of ethanol there was a false misconception about how trees grow and how much wood they produce, which skewed it, and once you removed that, it no longer was heat negative.

Perhaps there is something missing in your calculations you didn't account for in natural oil production.

That being said, I know for a fact that steam turbines are heat negative, and violate thermodynamics. Perhaps you can get better results if you use aquatuners to boil water to turn some turbines?

You could also dump excess hot water/oil into space. Technically this doesn't violate thermodynamics as it's no longer a closed system, but might as well because the heat is now gone from the universe and will never show it's ugly head again.

[Blech]

Originally posted by CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate:

I have a few questions for your setup:

What is the temperature of the natural gas produced from refining the oil?

How many watts of power does it cost to refine the oil, and how many kDTU are produced making that power?

Have you taken into account how many kDTU are produced by the refinement?

How many kDTU are produced to make 1.2 kW of power for the aquatuner?

How many kDTU are lost to storage of your power? (This includes energy lost, because energy lost is roughly equivalent with how much energy is in a similar amount of kDTUs)

I've seen claims of heat negativity on the wiki for oil production, even when using ethanol, but I also know that in the case of ethanol there was a false misconception about how trees grow and how much wood they produce, which skewed it, and once you removed that, it no longer was heat negative.

Perhaps there is something missing in your calculations you didn't account for in natural oil production.

That being said, I know for a fact that steam turbines are heat negative, and violate thermodynamics. Perhaps you can get better results if you use aquatuners to boil water to turn some turbines?

You could also dump excess hot water/oil into space. Technically this doesn't violate thermodynamics as it's no longer a closed system, but might as well because the heat is now gone from the universe and will never show it's ugly head again.

The system is entirely self contained in a loop, so all the power going into it comes from the 4K watts from the petroleum generators(Which are destroying the petroleum). There are 2 smart batteries in the system, excess power is outputted into the rest of the base. The gas temperature varies a bit, but seems to be dependent on the oil temperature.
And there is likely a lot missing from my calculations, since I am going on a gut feeling more than anything else. The issue might be that i built inside a pretty hot biome because of space restraints, so I don't know if it's my ineptitude in planning, of if it's my ineptitude in building in a +60degree biome :D I mean, I put 2 layers of insulating igneous rock tiles around it but that might not be enough :) So I am hoping that someone else will just come out and go "I have this working" so i can maybe try to tinker with it to make it work :)

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by Blech:

Originally posted by CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate:

I have a few questions for your setup:

What is the temperature of the natural gas produced from refining the oil?

How many watts of power does it cost to refine the oil, and how many kDTU are produced making that power?

Have you taken into account how many kDTU are produced by the refinement?

How many kDTU are produced to make 1.2 kW of power for the aquatuner?

How many kDTU are lost to storage of your power? (This includes energy lost, because energy lost is roughly equivalent with how much energy is in a similar amount of kDTUs)

I've seen claims of heat negativity on the wiki for oil production, even when using ethanol, but I also know that in the case of ethanol there was a false misconception about how trees grow and how much wood they produce, which skewed it, and once you removed that, it no longer was heat negative.

Perhaps there is something missing in your calculations you didn't account for in natural oil production.

That being said, I know for a fact that steam turbines are heat negative, and violate thermodynamics. Perhaps you can get better results if you use aquatuners to boil water to turn some turbines?

You could also dump excess hot water/oil into space. Technically this doesn't violate thermodynamics as it's no longer a closed system, but might as well because the heat is now gone from the universe and will never show it's ugly head again.

The system is entirely self contained in a loop, so all the power going into it comes from the 4K watts from the petroleum generators(Which are destroying the petroleum). There are 2 smart batteries in the system, excess power is outputted into the rest of the base. The gas temperature varies a bit, but seems to be dependent on the oil temperature.
And there is likely a lot missing from my calculations, since I am going on a gut feeling more than anything else. The issue might be that i built inside a pretty hot biome because of space restraints, so I don't know if it's my ineptitude in planning, of if it's my ineptitude in building in a +60degree biome :D I mean, I put 2 layers of insulating igneous rock tiles around it but that might not be enough :)

I don't know the answer myself. People who claimed it's possible may have miscalculated, or had some outside influence that helped them, or maybe it was possible, but now isn't. I've not tried it with oil yet, but I will tell you that between the tree growth and ethanol production, it is not heat negative to run them off of ethanol.

The problem with trees in this case was that trees did not produce 300 wood every growth cycle as had been thought. Each branch produces 300 wood a growth cycle (18 days wild, 4.5 domestic, 2.25 boosted) and a tree will grow up to 5 branches simultaneously (as many as it can find room for). This means for the normal input of hot dirt, it's producing 1500 wood, making the hot dirt much less of a heat sink than before.

I'm telling you about the trees to give you an idea of the kinds of things to look for in your setup. Unintended consequences you might have dismissed.

[Strygald]

Oil refineries output has a minimum fixed temp, 75c I think.. so it is pointless to input crude oil colder than that(harmful actually, unless you want heat).

[Blech]

Originally posted by Strygald:

Oil refineries output has a minimum fixed temp, 75c I think.. so it is pointless to input crude oil colder than that(harmful actually, unless you want heat).

I'm piping it in at 85, so that is not an issue i think. Should it be an issue at all though? You are removing 50% of the volume, which is about 50% of the heat gone right there.

[Strygald]

Originally posted by Blech:

Originally posted by Strygald:

Oil refineries output has a minimum fixed temp, 75c I think.. so it is pointless to input crude oil colder than that(harmful actually, unless you want heat).

I'm piping it in at 85, so that is not an issue i think. Should it be an issue at all though? You are removing 50% of the volume, which is about 50% of the heat gone right there.

True, you are removing 50% of the volume, so you have less heat on the map overall.. i'm not clear on where your aquatuners are though. Maybe the higher petroleum temp is due to the liquid picking up heat from the machines as it cools them.

[Blech]

Originally posted by CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate:

Originally posted by Blech:

The system is entirely self contained in a loop, so all the power going into it comes from the 4K watts from the petroleum generators(Which are destroying the petroleum). There are 2 smart batteries in the system, excess power is outputted into the rest of the base. The gas temperature varies a bit, but seems to be dependent on the oil temperature.
And there is likely a lot missing from my calculations, since I am going on a gut feeling more than anything else. The issue might be that i built inside a pretty hot biome because of space restraints, so I don't know if it's my ineptitude in planning, of if it's my ineptitude in building in a +60degree biome :D I mean, I put 2 layers of insulating igneous rock tiles around it but that might not be enough :)

I don't know the answer myself. People who claimed it's possible may have miscalculated, or had some outside influence that helped them, or maybe it was possible, but now isn't. I've not tried it with oil yet, but I will tell you that between the tree growth and ethanol production, it is not heat negative to run them off of ethanol.

The problem with trees in this case was that trees did not produce 300 wood every growth cycle as had been thought. Each branch produces 300 wood a growth cycle (18 days wild, 4.5 domestic, 2.25 boosted) and a tree will grow up to 5 branches simultaneously (as many as it can find room for). This means for the normal input of hot dirt, it's producing 1500 wood, making the hot dirt much less of a heat sink than before.

I'm telling you about the trees to give you an idea of the kinds of things to look for in your setup. Unintended consequences you might have dismissed.

In an effort to offset the environmental heat as much as possible i amped up the petroleum power so it is now driving pretty much the entire base. Lo and behold the oil is now stable at 70 degrees-ish. The petroleum is still rising a bit but it has slowed down significantly. It miiiight be working?

[Blech]

The answer is: You need to burn a lot of petroleum, and it takes a while to stabilize, but it works!

[Strygald]

Originally posted by Blech:

The answer is: You need to burn a lot of petroleum, and it takes a while to stabilize, but it works!

grats! now your next project is to build an oil boiler, and do away with those pesky refineries.

[Blech]

Originally posted by Strygald:

Originally posted by Blech:

The answer is: You need to burn a lot of petroleum, and it takes a while to stabilize, but it works!

grats! now your next project is to build an oil boiler, and do away with those pesky refineries.

I was actually looking into doing that without any lava or otherwise hot tiles, but then I gave up and did this instead :D I don't have anything much hotter than 200C on the map, as it's a frozen core map. But pointers on how to do that would be welcome :)

[Strygald]

If you don't have volcanoes then either wait until your rockets bring back Niobium or use metal refinery to heat petroleum up enough. Once you have a good amount of hot petroleum you can build a system where the 'outgoing' hot petroleum constantly exchanges heat with 'incoming' crude oil, bringing it near or to boiling temp, while cooling the petroleum down.

Angpaur had a good oil boiler that shows the heat exchange, it's in this forum somewhere.

[Hedning]

Destroying 50% mass is not a heat loss unless you intend to eventually cool that mass or have used it to cool something else first.

However heating the oil or petroleum is a waste. It is better to heat steam and use the steam for a steam turbine.

[Angpaur]

Here is the link to oil boiler discussion:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/457140/discussions/0/1640912849403248346/
Some other user posted there a metal refinery based boiler so it can be useful if you dont have any volcanos.

[Blech]

Originally posted by Hedning:

Destroying 50% mass is not a heat loss unless you intend to eventually cool that mass or have used it to cool something else first.

However heating the oil or petroleum is a waste. It is better to heat steam and use the steam for a steam turbine.

That is exactly what the aquatuner does...

[Hedning]

Originally posted by Blech:

That is exactly what the aquatuner does...

Yes and
"heating the oil or petroleum is a waste. It is better to heat steam and use the steam for a steam turbine."