0.15 and Flare Stack Problem

[evildogbot100]

I'm talking about using flamethrower to burn chests full of solid fuel.

My bad...

[greep]

Even if there aren't many good automated solutions, unautomated solutions that have almost no upkeep aren't bad either. Just making a few hundred requester chests for solid fuel and shotgunning them every few hundred hours isn't that bad is it? Belts and chests are good too. 1000 iron chests/burner insterters that get autoreplaced on destruction is only a few thousand iron lost, and that only takes green science logistic network. Wooden chests also help get rid of all that excess wood

That being said, this really sounds like a non-problem. If you have too much petroleum, use basic oil processing instead of advanced and circuit network to control cracking, and if you have too much light or heavy, just crack it. I can't think of any sane situation where basic oil processing gave too much petroleum in relation to other liquids. Unless we're talking about that brief period before cracking, in which case, suck it up and destroy like, one chest of fuel It's actually probably more work to set up 0.14 steam engines/boilers to burn it off in that case.

Until it gets to purple science. Purple science requires lubricant for engines. And lubricant production is not self sufficient. It has excess oil products, which I cannot trash in .15. I do not care about trashing some extra oil at this scale. For me it means trashing production of some 25 oil pumps, that's nothing, I have 500+ of them. But what I do care, is that I'm forced to have some un-needed dependency of my main base on that single lubricant outpost. Because the only solution right now seems to be converting these oil products into rocket fuel and bringing it to my central base, hoping that it will consume them eventually.

That sounds like a good enough solution though? Each space science uses way more oil products for fuel than the leftovers from each production science.

[HurkWurk]

ive always converted excess oils into solid fuel.
i can always find a use for solid fuels.

[Zool]

So far, any base I've seen that had problems with too much light oil and petroleoum made a very basic mistake: lack of control of the cracking process.

The most simple condition to control is is the following:
Cracking Heavy to Light Oil:
Heavy Oil > Light Oil

Cracking Light Oil to Petroleum:
Cracking Light to Petroleum:
Light Oil > Petroleum

These 2 conditions simply thrown into pumps that control the input of your cracking refinery, and such problems rarely happen.

[Engimage]

If you want full autonomy you can opt into coal liquefaction which produces pure heavy oil. Also on your main refinery you have to control heavy oil cracking so that pump to cracking facility turns on only if your heavy oil tanks are mostly full. Just connect pump to a tank and set enabled condition to heavy oil > 10000 and cracking will not drain heavy oil dedicated to lubricant production

[vanatteveldt]

If you want full autonomy you can opt into coal liquefaction which produces pure heavy oil. Also on your main refinery you have to control heavy oil cracking so that pump to cracking facility turns on only if your heavy oil tanks are mostly full. Just connect pump to a tank and set enabled condition to heavy oil > 10000 and cracking will not drain heavy oil dedicated to lubricant production

Liquefaction consumes heavy oil (plus steam and coal) and produces light+heavy+PG just like normal refining. So if for some reason you really need pure heavy (or light) oil there is simply no way to do it in a continuous process without intervention. Of course, you can create solid fuel and store it in a chain of chests that will last until factorio 2 is released, but that's not the point

[Qon]

This topic belongs in the suggestions board.
And there's a mod for that: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/GotLag/Flare%20Stack

[Koub]

I'll let this into general discussions, because there is no consensus :
- Either a stack burner is needed,
- Either a way to convert light oil / petroleum gas into their heavier version.
would do the trick

[HurkWurk]

oil + water = heavy oil, light oil, petroleum.
heavy oil + water = light oil
light oil + water = petroleum

petroleum > solid fuel.
solid fuel + steam + water = oil + heavy oil + light oil.

easy.

the science of it is Pyrolysis.

[Frightning]

I am having exactly the same problem. I was reading through the thread in a hope that community has some elegant solution. Instead, I found only lack of understanding of the problem and "you shouldn't want it". But I DO want to find an automated way to solve the problem. Simply because it's Factorio, where everything should be automated.

Problem is following:

I am building a 2k SPM (science per minute) mega base. All my production is distributed, I am not using centralized "do all smelting", "do all greens", "do all reds"... production, because at that scale rail system becomes a bottleneck. I split everything into smaller production blocks, and merge them locally with smaller rail networks. For example, I have on-site bot smelter, producing 10k plates a minute, and I am using only ore patches that can last for 100+ hours. I have on-site steel smelters, producing 2k steel a minute. I have red circuit outposts, producing 7k red a minute. To achieve that, I am wiring 2x copper plates, 1x iron plates, 1x coal outposts and ~100 oil pumps worth to a fairly small beaconed outpost that turn it all into red circuits. All of these production areas are self sufficient, and are capable of producing intermediates at certain amounts. And all I do, I just set up outposts and wire them together to create higher level products (science, and rocket components).

Until it gets to purple science. Purple science requires lubricant for engines. And lubricant production is not self sufficient. It has excess oil products, which I cannot trash in .15. I do not care about trashing some extra oil at this scale. For me it means trashing production of some 25 oil pumps, that's nothing, I have 500+ of them. But what I do care, is that I'm forced to have some un-needed dependency of my main base on that single lubricant outpost. Because the only solution right now seems to be converting these oil products into rocket fuel and bringing it to my central base, hoping that it will consume them eventually.

If you never achieved at least 1RPM, don't bother replying, you just don't understand the problem yet. You still have all the fun ahead, trying to build a bigger base.

The reason you're having issues with excess LO and PG is entirely because you insist on not using the LO and PG from your HO production to feed your other LO and PG needing processes. (PS, although I haven't made a 1RPM base, I do have one that is fairly large, and could easily be scaled to 1 RPM, which I started back in 0.12 days...and I have plans once the stable 0.15 lands to make a base far larger than that one).

[Gergely]

What if you never switch to electric furnaces? You can burn the excess oil in the burners, and you don't even have to replan your burner setup. Two birds with one stone. I bet you will have more than enough ores to smelt. You can never have enough iron plates.

[HurkWurk]

oh, since we have steam as a separate fluid now, can we please convert fraking processes to using steam instead of water please?
also this gives a reason to have electric steam generators so that i can place them near my oil production areas.

[Qon]

fraking processes

Fracking is a method for extracting crude oil from the ground.
Fractioning (Refining) is a method for splitting mixed oils (crude oil) into heavy and light oils by destillation ("moderate" heating) in many stages.
Cracking is a method for converting heavy oils into lighter ones by heating to very high temperature and using a hot catalyst, which causes the molecules to split.
By fraking you mean cracking?

oh, since we have steam as a separate fluid now, can we please convert fraking processes to using steam instead of water please?

Why? Is the existance of steam a good enough reason to use it? I don't know why water is included in the recipies for refining and cracking. Is that actually based on some real process?

[Mehve]

oh, since we have steam as a separate fluid now, can we please convert fraking processes to using steam instead of water please?

Why? Is the existance of steam a good enough reason to use it? I don't know why water is included in the recipies for refining and cracking. Is that actually based on some real process?

Not an invalid question, especially since they saw fit to do just that for the coal conversion process. Not a game-changer, but it would be kind of cool to make the other recipes require steam. It's not as though we haven't been making lots of steam from the very start, it's not as though steam takes any more room than water, and you could perhaps offer a refinery speed increase to simulate the reduced on-site energy usage?

And yes, the water requirement is absolutely realistic, since steam really is the thermal transfer method of choice at the temperatures commonly found in refineries. Usually the refineries have their own on-site boilers, but other times they'll get their steam from nearby dedicated facilities.

[Qon]

Not an invalid question, especially since they saw fit to do just that for the coal conversion process. Not a game-changer, but it would be kind of cool to make the other recipes require steam. It's not as though we haven't been making lots of steam from the very start, it's not as though steam takes any more room than water, and you could perhaps offer a refinery speed increase to simulate the reduced on-site energy usage?

Not that my factory should decide the future development of the game, but it's going to be a pain to have boilers inside my robot factory. The beacons will be wasted on them and I can't use prod modules wth them. Steam can't be barreled and redoing the piping to let both steam and water flow through my factory is going to be really hard, maybe impossible. If you are going to convince me that we should have steam for the process then there should be some benefits, some positive reason for doing this change.

And yes, the water requirement is absolutely realistic, since steam really is the thermal transfer method of choice at the temperatures commonly found in refineries. Usually the refineries have their own on-site boilers, but other times they'll get their steam from nearby dedicated facilities.

Really? If realism is the reason then some other reason is necessary. It's a game so there needs to be gameplay benefits. Realism by itself is not a good enough reason.
165 degree steam is way to cold to be useful. Even the 500 degree steam from the nuclear reactor + heat exchangers is too cold for several of the boiling fractions and for cracking. Vacuum destillation helps in some processes but is not enough by itself to bridge the gap. Seems more realistic then if the water is heated to appropriate temperature within the chem plants/refinery if we go that route.

I'm not convinced yet. Seems too much like a "we have steam now so lets just change recipies to use it for no reason and call it realism" for my taste.

[Mehve]

Not that my factory should decide the future development of the game, but it's going to be a pain to have boilers inside my robot factory. The beacons will be wasted on them and I can't use prod modules wth them. Steam can't be barreled and redoing the piping to let both steam and water flow through my factory is going to be really hard, maybe impossible. If you are going to convince me that we should have steam for the process then there should be some benefits, some positive reason for doing this change.

...

Really? If realism is the reason then some other reason is necessary. It's a game so there needs to be gameplay benefits. Realism by itself is not a good enough reason.
165 degree steam is way to cold to be useful. Even the 500 degree steam from the nuclear reactor + heat exchangers is too cold for several of the boiling fractions and for cracking. Vacuum destillation helps in some processes but is not enough by itself to bridge the gap. Seems more realistic then if the water is heated to appropriate temperature within the chem plants/refinery if we go that route.

I'm not convinced yet. Seems too much like a "we have steam now so lets just change recipies to use it for no reason and call it realism" for my taste.

No, I wouldn't advocate eliminating the old recipes. But even a second version of the common recipes that used steam instead of water, and were completed a second or two faster, might be a valid option, especially since it would scale with beacon-ing.

And I don't know what your own refinery experiences are, but all the ones that I visit are literally crawling with steam lines EVERYWHERE. True, there are high-temp things that are beyond what even superheated steam can do, but 165 C covers a fair number of applications. But I agree, "realism" isn't a valid excuse in itself for game decisions. As long as things slightly resemble reality (which they generally do in this game), I have no complaints. It would be an interesting option, is what I meant, although that probably qualifies it more for a mod then vanilla.