Oil Refining

[Captain Oveur]

I am trying to figure out how oil refining works. I created a big box to put oil into to heat up. For the height, I counted six blocks up and placed two of the distillation thingies (I forget what they're called). I created a second portion of box to put diesel into. I added a handful of other things like pumps and ports and a furnace to heat it up with. I sat there a while and nothing happened. I do more research and read that the oil needs to be heated to 300 to refine it. The furnace was only getting it barely over 100, as indicated by a fluid-fluid heat exchanger. I then went nuclear. I got the oil up over 300, but it's still sitting there doing nothing.

What temperature do I need to heat the oil to? Can I just get a load of oil from a seller and refine it, or is there a difference between what you can buy and what you can drill?

[Captain Oveur]

I'm watching a video now. Could it be I'm not getting anything due to not having pumps to pull the diesel out of the distiller? I've just stuck some pipes to it thinking gravity would pull it out.

I'll upload the setup soon, btw.

*EDIT*
I'm an idiot and didn't add a necessary pump

[GrumpyOldMan]

You can place the fractional distillation port with the rectangular part inline with a wall, this way you can check the tooltip if it will pull diesel or jet fuel even with an empty tank (as long as it's sealed), you need to connect the port outputs to an empy tank first, only then it'll show you.

I managed to get diesel/jet fuel refined within 20-25 seconds from starting to fill the tank and igniting the furnace. Use small oil amounts in the tank, so it will heat up way faster, you will pull out diesel/jet fuel regardless, this is only dependant on the oil temperature itself. As for the furnace it's best to pump the oil through it directly.

The conversion ratios are 0.5l diesel and 0.5l jet fuel for every liter of oil refined. Maximum conversion rate seems to be around 10-12l/s, no matter how hot the oil is or how much oil is in the distillation tank.

[Captain Oveur]

Originally posted by GrumpyOldMan:

You can place the fractional distillation port with the rectangular part inline with a wall, this way you can check the tooltip if it will pull diesel or jet fuel even with an empty tank (as long as it's sealed), you need to connect the port outputs to an empy tank first, only then it'll show you.

I managed to get diesel/jet fuel refined within 20-25 seconds from starting to fill the tank and igniting the furnace. Use small oil amounts in the tank, so it will heat up way faster, you will pull out diesel/jet fuel regardless, this is only dependant on the oil temperature itself. As for the furnace it's best to pump the oil through it directly.

The conversion ratios are 0.5l diesel and 0.5l jet fuel for every liter of oil refined. Maximum conversion rate seems to be around 10-12l/s, no matter how hot the oil is or how much oil is in the distillation tank.

I took a different approach in the end (I'll get to that), but I think you just answered a new question I had. I had a big batch of oil cooking to get diesel. I think it was sitting about 400-ish. I didn't run it for too long and the tank didn't stand tall enough to convert to jet fuel (it was only 4 of those things tall), but I managed to get a *ton* of jet fuel. I thing the fluids I recovered from that test and then transferred to the next test, I had like 11Kl of jet fuel.

So what you're saying about that is that both fluids are produced when at temps? This feels exploitable. Cook a large vat of oil but distill the diesel out of it. Cook all of the oil. The diesel will filter out (mostly) and what remains will be a mix of diesel and jet. It would be easy to design a layout to have minimal loss of diesel. Pump the remaining fluid into a jet fuel tank and the diesel will get deleted.

Anyway, what I ended up doing: I decided to go nuclear. Use pumps and fluid ports to fill the reactor with oil and heat it up to about 530. Add in the distiller(s) and fill in any spaces necessary.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2960411471

[Captain Oveur]

I got to thinking about what I said about designing a giant vat in a certain way to separate diesel from jet and I thought about my experiments so far. I don’t think it would be necessary to design a narrow lower section. I think spamming a few distillers down at the lowest levels to get diesel would do. Fill the tank with oil and let it brew for a while while the distillers remove just the diesel. As long as the distillers are within the lower half of the tank (that way they remain submerged in the diesel/jet/oil mix), they’ll remove as much diesel as you have time to tolerate.

By then, there shouldn’t be any considerable amount of oil left, so you’d have mainly jet with some diesel; for example, 11k jet compared to only 38 diesel and 0 oil when I ended my experimentation. Again, I heated it with nuclear and transferring it to the workshop with hoses didn’t register as radioactive. I’ll do more tests tomorrow, but I have to run a personal supply mission or two to get more oil lol. I’m also going to modify the test setup some more.