Oil Refineries

[Oldwolf]

Hello I am new to Factorio. Well let's say newish.

I have played four games but only one got to the point of having a rail line and Oil Refineries. This took all day, 8 straight hours.

Remember I am still learning so I am not a super logical, efficient Factorio Vets yet .

At this point I needed Plastics and to make Sulfuric Acid out of Sulfur; all these things are derived from the Oils made in the Refinery.

Because of the linked mechanic of the three products generated in the refinery I made Plastic and Sulfur for about 2 to 5 minutes before the Refinery shut down.

You see, the Light Oil had filled it's storage tank and when it stopped they all stopped i.e. Petroleum and Heavy Oil.

I could not get them flowing again to save my life and thus that play through was killed.

I tried adding more storage to all three, adding pumps to try and pull more product out, nothing worked.

It is my opinion {yes everybody has one } that those three Refinery Products should be "Unlinked" from each other.

I know it is a game and as such takes liberties with emulating "real life". But it is ridiculous to think the refineries will stop making any thing before the deposit is run dry.

Please consider this carefully and hopefully fix this or make a mod that fixes this.

Keep on Truckin'

[Mehve]

Not exactly. Even in real life, refineries can't just dump their byproducts. But yes, everybody hits the point where they're stuck trying to store all the extra heavy and light oil, because all they want is the petroleum.

Short term, you can either keep adding storage for the excess, or just convert it into solid fuel, since it can be burned in anything that takes coal. Further down the road, you'll also need between 7000-10000 solid fuel to get a rocket launched, so you could always start saving early if you wanted.

Long term, your best bet is to focus your research towards advanced oil refining, which gives you recipes for cracking heavy oil into light, and light into petroleum.

[Xterminator]

I think many new players run into this problem, and I did as well when I first started.
While the Logistics of using those 3 products can be confusing or even annoying, there is a fairly easy solution.
The best solution is to use the extra products (in this case, light and heavy oil) to make other useful products. So make solid fuel from the light oil, and lubricant from the heavy. You will need lube anyway later down the road for electric engines. The solid fuel can be stored for later or used in trains or boilers etc.

Once you get Blue Science, it is typically best to research Advanced Oil Processing first because this allows you to crack the light and heavy oil to get you more petroleum. Once you have this research unlocked you can turn your heavy oil into light oil, and then the light oil into petroleum.
The ideal ratio for this so that you don't have extra light/heavy laying around still, is 5 Refineries using the Advanced Oil Processing recipe, then 1 chemical plant cracking heavy oil into light oil, and then 7 chem plants cracking light into petroleum. This will use up all your light/heavy and give you lots of extra petro.

[Bushdoctor]

Yes, what those guys said...
Also, there's the crude solution of picking up one of your topped of storage tanks and replacing it with an empty one.


(Xterminator, your first icon has a typo)

[Deadly-Bagel]

Once you get oil the first thing you do is set up blue science (requiring batteries and petroleum) and research Advanced Oil Processing. Then you can turn all that heavy and light oil into petroleum! No wastage. Also if all you're doing is blue science you don't need more than a single tank for each oil type as a full tank of petroleum more than covers the required science packs (as long as you don't turn it ALL into sulphuric acid, thinking about it I would probably not use a storage tank for that and instead feed it directly to batteries...)