There's a couple different ways of getting propene that I've found, though I'm still new to PetroChem myself. Personally, I'm creating it from Methanol. Couple ways of making that too, though I forget at which tech points these unlock.eloquentJane wrote:As for your other question, plastic - and the rest of the oil industry - is...complicated. There's not really a "basic" way of obtaining it. As far as I can tell, the earliest possible way to get plastic is using propene in an advanced chemical plant, though there are quicker and more efficient methods unlocked with further research (efficiency increases with complexity).
The simplest way I can find of obtaining propene (and I think the only way) is as follows:
•Extract multi-phase oil from an oil patch using a pumpjack
•Separate multi-phase oil into crude oil (and byproducts) in an oil and gas separator
•Produce naphtha (and byproducts) in a refinery using crude oil
•Synthesize propene in a steam cracker using naphtha
1st way:
- One of those byproducts for multi-phase oil is Raw Gas, which can also be obtained by putting Natural Gas (a different type of oil patch, it looks green) in the same building
- Raw Gas can be put into a Gas Refinery to produce Natural Gas Liquids (and by products)
- Another round in the Gas Refinery (Recipe is called "Gas Fractioning") can break the Natural Gas Liquids into Methane and byproducts
- Use a Steam Cracker and Purified Water to make Methanol
- Another round in the cracker to synthesize Propene
- For the next step, you need to be able to produce Carbon Dioxide (put coal in a Liquifier), and Green Metal Catalysts (Silver ore and Bauxite, plus a small startup of iron for reusable Metal Catalyst Carriers)
- in a standard Chemical Plant, use Catalytic Synthesis (The previous 2 ingredients plus Hydrogen )to create Methanol
- Use Steam Cracker to crack to Propene, as above
