Oil Production

[supernaturally]

I have six pump jacks, seemingly pumping fine into for storage tanks. I have three refineries and and a chemical plant. For some unknown reason the oil goes to refineries and plant very sporadically, when it does the flames shows on the refinery for a few moments or the plant works to produce a piece of plastic. All of the oil fields have over 40% yield. Not sure what I'mdoing wrong. I've also added productivity modules to 4 of the pumpjacks.

[Mehve]

At a glance, your heavy and light oil storages seem to be full. Refineries won't operate if ANY of their outputs are backed up, which means that you need to send the heavy and light oil somewhere else, even if you're not using it right then.

Typical options include converting your light oil to solid fuel (it gets the best conversion ratio), and converting some of your heavy oil to lubricant (maybe start making electric motors with the lubricant? You'll need a bunch to make a rocket silo eventually). Flamethrower fuel is another good option, but there's probably a limit to how much you'd want to make. Beyond that, just keep adding storage tanks until you research Advanced Oil Processing, which will give you recipes for cracking heavy>light and light>petroleum.

[Frightning]

At a glance, your heavy and light oil storages seem to be full. Refineries won't operate if ANY of their outputs are backed up, which means that you need to send the heavy and light oil somewhere else, even if you're not using it right then.

Typical options include converting your light oil to solid fuel (it gets the best conversion ratio), and converting some of your heavy oil to lubricant (maybe start making electric motors with the lubricant? You'll need a bunch to make a rocket silo eventually). Flamethrower fuel is another good option, but there's probably a limit to how much you'd want to make. Beyond that, just keep adding storage tanks until you research Advanced Oil Processing, which will give you recipes for cracking heavy>light and light>petroleum.

Besides the tank full issue: each Oil refinery can handle up to 2 Crude oil/sec, so with the 3 you have there, that's 6 Crude oil/sec. 5x 40% yield Oil fields given 5X0.4=2 Crude oil/second before modules, which is only enough to keep one running full tilt (so in practice, probably 2 or 3 will run sporadically).

Note: Get rid of the productivity modules from pumpjacks, use speed modules instead, since oil fields never run out, they eventually settle at 10% yield, or 0.1 Crude oil/sec, productivity will increase the 'windfall' amount, but you get it much slower, and hence total Crude oil provided will be lower at every time point in the future despite the increased windfall amount because it takes far longer to get the windfall amount out of the ground. With speed, you accelerate the entire process as well as increased the depleted oil rate.

[supernaturally]

Adding the tanks worked, thanks so very much for the help. Also thanks for the extra insight on yield with the speed modules verses the power ones.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

On the topic of oil production, I'd like to ask some questions concerning ratios and throughput. Specifically, how does one efficiently pump crude to a refinery, is it better to refine close to your oil, or pump oil long distances to be cracked where it is being used?

I've read a few things on the wiki concerning fluid dynamics, and how pumps help, but I'm afraid it lost me on the third turn.

I'm assuming that to fully populate a refinery, assuming all oil is reduced to the minimum 0.1 per patch, you need 10 patches, or 8 with 1x speed boosts, or 7 with 2x speed boosts or something along that line. I believe speed uprages are going to be the most efficient in pumpjacks as well, or at least better than productivity. Not sure if a beacon is going to be better than just making a bunch of modules.

In short, I'm looking to optimize my oil production because it is one major part of the game where I am sorely lacking in efficiency. I've got most of the other ratios down (12 electric furnaces per yellow belt or 24 per red, 1:1 electric miner to electric furnace, that sort of thing), but this fluid stuff is throwing me for a loop.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Well it's easier to pump a single pipe of Crude Oil than it is to pump the three products, though Heavy Oil only really gets turned into Lubricant and Light Oil into Solid Fuel for the Rocket.

As long as you keep fluid in the tanks, fluid mechanics aren't really anything to worry too much about. I've piped oil fair distances, my bro piped it some 1,000 tiles in his game and it worked fine. I would recommend for long distances to load the oil into barrels and send it by train. I find while it's more setup initially it's MUCH easier to expand later on, especially if you're carting in ores by train, and pipes are likely to get destroyed by biters but that's just my preference.

As for ratios, Advanced Oil Processing consumes 10 oil every 5 seconds, or 2 oil per second. You would therefore need 20 Pumpjacks running at 0.1/s to supply it without the use of Speed Modules.

Speed Modules are indeed the best choice for use in Pumpjacks, but before messing about with beacons you should install Productivity modules in your oil processing. 20% may not sound like a lot, but when you add it to each product in the chain it multiplies exponentially. For example, ignoring cracking you get 120% Petroleum, then 144% Sulphur, then 172.8% Sulphuric Acid, then 207.36% Batteries. With the use of Productivity Modules you've halved the amount of Crude Oil used in making Batteries, using far less modules than if you wanted to double your oil supply.

If you can, it is worth also installing them in Advanced Circuits and Processing Units production (after you've moduled up all your oil processing first of course), especially because it significantly reduces the load on your Electronic Circuits.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Well it's easier to pump a single pipe of Crude Oil than it is to pump the three products, though Heavy Oil only really gets turned into Lubricant and Light Oil into Solid Fuel for the Rocket.

As long as you keep fluid in the tanks, fluid mechanics aren't really anything to worry too much about. I've piped oil fair distances, my bro piped it some 1,000 tiles in his game and it worked fine. I would recommend for long distances to load the oil into barrels and send it by train. I find while it's more setup initially it's MUCH easier to expand later on, especially if you're carting in ores by train, and pipes are likely to get destroyed by biters but that's just my preference.

As for ratios, Advanced Oil Processing consumes 10 oil every 5 seconds, or 2 oil per second. You would therefore need 20 Pumpjacks running at 0.1/s to supply it without the use of Speed Modules.

Speed Modules are indeed the best choice for use in Pumpjacks, but before messing about with beacons you should install Productivity modules in your oil processing. 20% may not sound like a lot, but when you add it to each product in the chain it multiplies exponentially. For example, ignoring cracking you get 120% Petroleum, then 144% Sulphur, then 172.8% Sulphuric Acid, then 207.36% Batteries. With the use of Productivity Modules you've halved the amount of Crude Oil used in making Batteries, using far less modules than if you wanted to double your oil supply.

If you can, it is worth also installing them in Advanced Circuits and Processing Units production (after you've moduled up all your oil processing first of course), especially because it significantly reduces the load on your Electronic Circuits.

Thank you very much for that, but I have another question...

How are productivity modules even remotely worth it? I mean, if it reduce speed by 20%, but only increases productivity by 4%, that doesn't seem even remotely like a good tradeoff, power consumption notwithstanding. Have I missed something here?

[darkfrei]

How are productivity modules even remotely worth it? I mean, if it reduce speed by 20%, but only increases productivity by 4%, that doesn't seem even remotely like a good tradeoff, power consumption notwithstanding. Have I missed something here?

You can made more refineries, but not yields. With more refineries you can get more oil product and with beacons you can set your speed much higher.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

How are productivity modules even remotely worth it? I mean, if it reduce speed by 20%, but only increases productivity by 4%, that doesn't seem even remotely like a good tradeoff, power consumption notwithstanding. Have I missed something here?

You can made more refineries, but not yields. With more refineries you can get more oil product and with beacons you can set your speed much higher.

Ahh, yea, that makes more sense.

I saw a youtube tutorial that assumed 5x refineries with advanced cracking in its ratio, and I was like 'wait, that requires a HUNDRED oil deposits... no way in hockey sticks and I gonna hit THAT'.

[Deadly-Bagel]

As I said it doesn't look like it's worth it, and if you just install them in your refineries it isn't really but when you start installing them in different stages of oil processing they stack multiplicatively. Even if you only use T1 Productivity Modules, you'll need about 26.5% less oil per battery without factoring in cracking.

And the 20% speed loss is constant across tiers so upgrading your modules only increases the output without affecting input. Compared to an un-moduled chem plant, 2x T3 Productivity Modules produces 72% of the output per second but consumes 60% of the resources.

[vanatteveldt]

As remarked above, production modules and speed modules have very good synergy: the speed penalty is cancelled by the speed bonus in an additive fashion, but the production bonus and speed bonus are multiplied to get throughput.So, never use prod modules without also using speed modules, either in the same plant or in a nearby beacon. Especially once you get prod3 modules with +10% per module in a significant part of your chain, you really get enormous savings. In general, the more "raw" resources consumed per second by a plant, the higher the savings are: See this post by DaveMcW viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5705

You can also choose to ship only solid outputs of your refinery: solid/rocket fuel, sulfur, and plastic. Although it is less convenient to ship shulphur since any part of the factory that needs sulphur gas will also require water, water is often abundant and this has the advantage of being able to use normal trains and belts for shipping refinery output. The only thing you can't ship like this is lubricant, so you will either have to use that (relatively) close to the refinery, or you make a custom plant for lubricant (crude barrel -> normal oil processing -> lubricant plus waste products. You can 'delete' the light oil/gas byproducts by piping them into an idle steam generator, or you can turn them into solid fuel and use it e.g. for trains or for power generation. Since you normally don't need that much lubricant (compared to plastic/sulfur, at least), this can be a fine solution as well.