Chapter 18 ‐ Oil processing part 2 ‐ Advanced oil processing and products

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Advanced oil processing

Advanced oil processing requires both water and crude oil as inputs from specific input pipes that cannot be switched. The recipe produces heavy oil, light oil, and petroleum gas from specific output pipes that cannot be switched. With five different fluids involved, advanced oil processing tends to cause pipe spaghetti unless one carefully plans their pipe layouts. Despite the increased complexity, advanced oil processing is worthwhile because it produces more petroleum gas from the same amount of crude oil and produces the other two fluids on top of that. Furthermore, the heavy oil and light oil are required for late game recipes.

Advanced oil products

The two new advanced oil products are lubricant and rocket fuel. Lubricant is made from heavy oil and is used for advanced mechanical systems like robotics and express transport belts. Rocket fuel is an extra-processed fuel made from light oil and solid fuel. Rocket fuel is superior to solid fuel in energy density and performance, and is required for assembling space rockets.

The problem of excess fluids

Advanced oil processing produces three different fluids at the same time. If you use up all of one fluid but not much of another fluid, the unused fluid will fill up its pipes and storage. This will block the oil refinery from producing any more fluids of any type.

The easy way to remove excess an excess oil fluid is make solid fuel out of it. Another option is to convert it into another type using cracking.

Cracking

Cracking is an industrial process where heat and water is used to break heavier crude oil molecules into lighter ones. In Factorio, you can use cracking to convert heavy oil into light oil and also light oil into petroleum gas. This is a way to make use of excess heavy oil or light oil. However, since it requires water, you need additional pipes around the chemical plants.

Solid fuel production for "voiding"

When you have excess amounts of heavy oil, light oil, or petroleum gas; you can get it out of your fluid system by making solid fuel out of it. This is a fairly simple solution because the solid fuel recipes do not require any additional ingredients, and filling up chests with solid fuel is more space-efficient than filling up fluid tanks. In addition, solid fuel is an ingredient for rocket fuel, which you need plenty of for building a rocket.

The main downside to this approach is that it is an inefficient use of your oil resources. You need to ensure that chemical plants for producing solid fuel are the farthest from your oil refineries and cracking plants so that any other building that needs the oils can consume them first. Otherwise you may end up with growing piles of solid fuel but a shortage of other oil products.

The easy design for of advanced oil processing

If you are worried or troubled with all the pipes involved, an easy way to do advanced oil processing is to aim for producing only three products: lubricant, rocket fuel, and petroleum gas. None of these recipes need water and so you do not need to weave pipes. In fact, you can make design where all 3 output pipes from your oil refinery are kept straight.

In this design, for heavy oil, you need a lubricant plant next to the refinery, and then you can have a solid fuel plant down the pipe for absorbing the excess heavy oil. For petroleum gas, you can have just one solid fuel plant right next to the oil refinery. Finally, for light oil you can have a long pipe heading along the middle line, away from the oil refinery. Along this pipe you can have two rocket fuel plants on either side. We want four of these plants in total because the rocket fuel recipe is much slower than the others. The first pair of plants can take in the solid fuel produced nearby from the other fluids. To feed the other two rocket fuel plants, and to take care of excess light oil, you should also have one solid fuel plant on either side of the light oil pipe. Finally, if you connect up all these buildings with inserters and belts, you end up with a fairly simple and decent supply of lubricant and rocket fuel and optionally solid fuel without having to worry about cracking or excess fluid buildup.

Note that you can find and explore a copy of this design in Demo Map 3.

Coal liquification

A third recipe that oil refineries offer is coal liquification, which is unlocked with production science in the late game. It requires regular solid coal, a bit of heavy oil, and some steam as inputs, and it produces mostly heavy oil, some light oil, and a bit of petroleum gas. The piping for coal liquification is messy, like with advanced oil processing, but it allows you to substitute oil with coal in case of an oil shortage and it also allows extracting more chemical energy per unit from the coal that gets processed.

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