Ethanol Vs burning wood

[Bullock]

Did some1 crunched the numbers to know if its worth the troubles ?
I know u get twice more power from ethanol but wit the cost of the transformation + cooling and maybe some other things, I wonder if its worth the troubles in a hot world.

[Blake Walsh]

The only good use for a wood burner is feeding slicksters, the things generate an absurd amount of carbon dioxide. The ethanol process also generates a lot of carbon dioxide but you get more power and you also get water out of it, though it's only really worth using with wild trees (i.e. planted by pips).

[Bullock]

Yeah im not farming anymore since the pips are here.
Still I wonder how much extra power u get when you take into account all the transformation cost and cooling. Im on map where everything is at 70° so I have to cool it.
Even with basic heat transfer im not sure its worth it.

If i was on a cool map I would do it without even thinking, but i wonder if its not a trap on a hot asteroid.
That said i might need the water so ...

Thx for the input =)

[L37]

Wood/power ratio looks like this:
wood burner - 4g/w
petroleum generator/ethanol - ~3.85g/w

That is only including distillers for ethanol, not including any automation, pumps, etc.

So it is not really worth the time/complexity unless you want byproducts or are going to tune up generators.

One thing that makes ethanol useful for me is that it is very convinient to store, deliver and use. It is very nicw way to store any extra power you have, instead of trying to store things like natgas or hydrogen.

[Bullock]

Thks mate !

[Blake Walsh]

Originally posted by Bullock:

Yeah im not farming anymore since the pips are here.
Still I wonder how much extra power u get when you take into account all the transformation cost and cooling. Im on map where everything is at 70° so I have to cool it.
Even with basic heat transfer im not sure its worth it.

The heat won't be a problem. I normally just make my ethanol distillery in an insulated slickster chamber, it literally can't get too hot in there. But even if you don't want to have a slickster chamber, it's the same principle, put the distillery and petroleum generator somewhere a little outside your main base, insulated from the main base, and have access with exosuits, let it turn into a stinking hellhole, it takes basically forever for temperatures to become problematic for gold amalgam equipment and dupes in suits, just make sure to insulate the ethanol pipes and storage because it boils at 78 C, though it probably won't even get that hot. There are heat deletion methods that are free or basically free, for example I like to use rock debris as a heat sink (that is let the heat soak into rocks and whatever debris are left laying around from digging out the rooms), if hatches end up eating the hot rocks they poop out room temperature coal, and if the debris get used in construction the temperature is set to 45 C if it was higher, so any heat dumped into rocks is pretty much going to end up getting deleted even if you make no formal heat deletion setup. Just insulate the stuff that has to remain cool and use a thermo regulator or thermo aquatuner to transport heat outside into the hot zone.

[fractalgem]

Originally posted by Bullock:

Yeah im not farming anymore since the pips are here.
Still I wonder how much extra power u get when you take into account all the transformation cost and cooling. Im on map where everything is at 70° so I have to cool it.
Even with basic heat transfer im not sure its worth it.

If i was on a cool map I would do it without even thinking, but i wonder if its not a trap on a hot asteroid.
That said i might need the water so ...

Thx for the input =)

You...shooould be fine. You MIGHT want to rush steam-turbine cooling though. Honestly, I had far more problems stemming from ramping up steel production without exosuits (lots of really really hot steps) than I got from the bunch of ethanol generators and the petroleum generator I plopped out in the desert.


And yeah, the extra bit of water from it is nice. It's probably cooler than the water you'd get from most geysers/vents, at least.

[Prometheus]

The full ethanol cycle requires 4 distillers, one pump to suck up the water and the skimmers to take care of the CO2. Which is also 4 by the way. Well actually 3.7 or something like that, but that just means you get a bit more power than the simple calculation tells you. The simple calc is the whole set up takes 1680 W to maintain. A bit less because one of the skimmers doesn't need to run full time and the pump doesn't run full out either. So you come out with 500 to 600 W extra. Plus 1000 W if you tune up the generator.

Its a lot of work for the equivalent of a coal generator or less. However it gets you 800kg per cycle of of polluted dirt and 750kg of polluted water per cycle. That is enough water for 6 dupes worth of oxygen. A coal generator takes 600kg of coal per cycle running non-stop. Sage Hatches will convert that dirt to coal 1 to 1 for you and give you lots of eggs or meat on top of it. That leaves you with enough dirt to do plenty of farming.

[fractalgem]

I actually turned my compost bins off becuase there is just soooo much dirt on oasis-I may as well get a little bit of oxygen from letting the polluted dirt turn into polluted o2-especially since sand is EVERYWHERE.