Thoughts on Oil to Natgas Refinery using Thermostats

[Abt9]

I've heard that this is one of the hardest challenge in the game, as it requires lots of heat exchange in extreme temperatures. I think these tricks are something well-known, but I couldn't find relevant posts.

So here's an idea:

1. Hold the temperature of 600C sour gas and -190C methane, and use reverse flow heat transfer in the middle. This helps as you do not need an artificial heat transfer method like aquatuners, which is largely not abailable for its power and cooling/coolant requirements.

 

2. High temperature end.

Most machines cannot work without space materials. My goal is avoiding use of them if possible, so external heat source is needed to keep the sour gas temperature. One can put magma when temperature drops. I don't know how much magma you'd need here, but judging by practicality of oil boilers, this shouldn't be too hard.

I guess the hardest part here is low conductivity of sour gas, and there is not so much ways to go around this other than using materials which helps with conductivity.

 

3. Low temperature end.

Here, machines do work fine but there's one problem: liquid methane has so narrow temperature range that it is quite hard to get it not condense into a liquid. Also no good liquid coolants with decent SHC exists. My solution? Let it freeze! I think it is not that hard to make a pool of liquid oxygen on its vaporization point - this will maintain that specific temperatures. And solids, it could be spread through storage compactors so that heat transfer could rapidly happen. (Spreading 500kg into 25 compactors of 20kg gives 25 times the heat transfer). It can easily be liquidified there, and later you can just apply the reverse heat transfer as it is easier to handle these fluids.

You could do the same for sulfur, but Idk if it is worth the hassle because it has so low SHC to matter much.

By the way, Heating the natural gas to 220C seems to achieve the heat stability, without cooling or heating needed - thus less machinery required. So I want to know, if it's possible to have the generators consume such a scalding gas.

 

How do you think?

[Abt9]

Uhm, is this a laughable idea?

[CrixOMix]

I think this idea is VERY doable but only after thermium and super coolant. It's quite a bit more complicated without those materials, though doable. Thermium allows for high temp gas pumps/liquid pumps, and super coolant allows you to move heat around via aquatuners for much cheaper. And since the system, at the end of the day, should be producing cold natgas, I'm guessing the power gain from turning oil to natgas can pay for the aquatuner cost. I haven't come anywhere close to doing the math or making a sandbox version, but at a first glance it seems reasonable.

However, doing it without super coolant or thermium seems like the most royal pain in the butt ever, and you're going to need to use magma, all sorts of interesting cooling methods, weird door systems to move materials around, etc. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's probably not worth it, though I'd love to see a system that works!

[Stoned]

Hmm sounds overly complex. And nearly impossible to balance out or use full automation.

One thermite aquatuner can do it all. Cook the oil and provide the cold liquid to cool the sour gas. You need a bit of fullerine and some niobium and it is all there. I use a steam engine to precool the sour gas to <300C and then the cold methane to cool it to <30C. Can all be done in survival with no dupe or human maintenance required.

I use the cold nat gas for cooling and send >500C nat gas to the generators, no problem, no additional heat generated.

[Oozinator]

47 minutes ago, Abt9 said:

Uhm, is this a laughable idea?

Do you think so?

[Gus Smedstad]

9 hours ago, Abt9 said:

How do you think?

Mostly I think I'd be a lot more interested in example builds using the constraint you mentioned - no space materials - than some speculation.

To address some of what you said, though:

There's no reason to be afraid of aquatuners. 1200 watts is a fair amount, but the natural gas you create is going to provide more than enough energy to sustain one.

What you said about freezing methane doesn't make a lot of sense. It sounds like you're trying to address a non-issue.

Cooling's going to be a huge problem without supercoolant. You can get hydrogen that cold, but the specific heat of 1 kg of hydrogen is quite low compared to 10kg of supercoolant. You can make liquid oxygen using cold hydrogen, and that's better for specific heat, but it's still not good.

By and large people wait for supercoolant before making machinery that needs temperatures that low.

Generators don't care about the temperatures of their inputs. I've fed 500+ C petroleum to a petroleum generator, and there's no upper limit to how hot natural gas can be going into a natural gas generator.

The best oil -> natural gas converter I've seen is this:

 

It requires thermium and supercoolant.

[Denisetwin]

2 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

The best oil -> natural gas converter I've seen is this:

 

It requires thermium and supercoolant

 

I like this build from @Lifegrow I always think I am going to build it once I get to space but by the time I get my colony where I think I am ready to breach the surface, a new update comes along that changes everything or has something new added that I want to see so I start over.   @Abt9  I think most of us on the forum enjoy seeing new builds, even if they are more complex than need be - build your design and test it out!

[CrixOMix]

So by my math, you can turn crude oil to natgas with a net of about 5 joules per gram of oil. This assumes you have access to a volcano or magma at the bottom of the map which provides "free" heat. This requires no space tech. Just steel.

Steps:

Dump oil into hotbox that is kept at 555* C, the oil will almost instant turn to petrol and then quickly change to sour gas. Problem is that the sour gas is at 555* and that's too hot for any pre-space materials, so you need to move it out of there via automated doors. This is pretty easy to do. What you'll want is to let the pressure of sour gas build up until it's about 10-15kg per square, and then open a door in the ROOF of your hotbox to let it UP into the bottom of a steam room. This steam room will have enough steam to fill the two squares below the steam turbine inlets, and about two squares below that for natgas to flow in. You will probably need two steam turbines to steal the heat away from the natgas. Let's say the natgas flows into the bottom right of the steam room, and the door will only open when the pressure from the natgas room is >15kg AND the temperature of the steam room is below 150*. So then it will let in some natgas, which will then cool to 150 quickly by generating steam heat.

 

So then in the bottom left of that room, you have a steel gas pump which will take that 150 degree natgas and pump it up into the cooling room. The cooling room will have hydrogen gas which is supercooled to about -170 degrees celcius using thermo regulators. This is where more power is wasted due to no space materials. Using an aquatuner with supercoolant would make this extremely efficient. However, the thermo regulators should be sitting in the steam room (made of steel, of course), this way the heat extracted is at least turned back into steam power for some gains back. This will put about .625 joules per gram back into the system. Equivalent to coal power efficiency.

So the cooling room will change your 150* sour gas into methane liquid at -170*, then a liquid pump will pump this methane in insulated pipes to your power room. This power room will be sealed with a pool of pwater below it. When the liquid methane drops into the pwater, the pwater will immediately boil the methane into nat gas, then you can pump this natgas directly into natgas generators, which will then drop their pwater into the same room. You can utilize a gas compressor to get rid of the CO2 or pump it out, the power usage to get rid of the CO2 is fairly small but not zero. This would steal .2 joules per gram of nat gas.

So lets review: crude oil (assumed to be at 80* C) is put into the hotbox. Hotbox makes sour gas at 555*C, using up about 815DTUs per gram (this can help you calculate maximum throughput for your volcano). Then sour gas is released via automation into the bottom of a steam room but only at high pressure. This allows the high heat energy of the sour gas to be turned into power. So far the system has used .024J per gram of crude (for the pump) Then the sour gas is pumped from the steam room at a much cooler temp of 150 into the cool room. Cost of .48J per gram. The cool room uses cold hydrogen to condense sour gas into liquid methane at -170*. Cost of 4.61J per gram. The liquid methane is pumped into the natgas room. Cost of .024J per gram. The polluted water will warm up the liquid methane and turn it into natgas, which you then pump into the natgas generators. Cost of .48J per gram.

Total energy cost: 5.618 Joules per gram.

Total steam energy gained: 1.333 Joules per gram

Total natgas energy gained: 8.889 Joules per gram.

Net energy: 4.604 Joules per gram of crude oil. With just a petrol boiler, you gain 1 joule per crude, and with an oil refinery, it's only .5 joules. EDIT: I forgot to mention, each thermoregulator will provide enough cooling to condense about 50grams of sour gas per second. And each steam turbine will support ~637 grams per second of this system. So about 12 thermo regulators per steam turbine, and one natgas generator per 2 thermo regulators, roughly. And a normal sized volcano with average output can heat about 1400 grams per second of crude oil. So a setup to handle a full volcano would be insane!

Hope you've enjoyed reading my thought experiment. I have no idea if it actually works but all the math checks out! And for kicks, if you switch out the thermo regulators for aquatuners with supercoolant, it only takes .655J per gram to cool to methane, which takes the net energy to 8.558J per gram, which is almost a perfect 1:1 petrol to natgas conversion. Essentially the steam power pays for moving everything around.

[Gus Smedstad]

@CrixOMix that seems pretty reasonable.  However, I’m pretty sure it’s possible to create a much more thermally efficient method, like one of @JohnFrancis’s oil boilers. He’s demonstrated builds that don’t require space materials, but which still do most of the heating of oil up to 400 C by transferring the heat from the outgoing petroleum using radiant pipes and a counter-flow heat exchanger. A good sour gas boiler should do the same thing, transfer most of the heat from the hot sour gas to the incoming oil.

You also want to use the outgoing cold natural gas to cool the sour gas, instead of cooling a polluted water pool as you suggest. That’s a second counterflow heat exchanger.

You can see both of those steps in @Lifegrow‘s build. The aquatuner cools the late-stage sour gas, and transfers the heat to the incoming oil, boiling it to sour gas. Heat from the sour gas is what converts the methane into natural gas, not a pool of polluted water. At roughly the same time, heat transfers from the sour gas to outgoing natural gas in a radiant pipe, cooling the sour gas and heating the natural gas. Next if the sour gas is still very hot, some of that heat transfers to a steam turbine. Finally, the sour gas enters the cooling loop powered by the aquatuner.

A build that didn’t rely on an aquatuner is going to look much different, and be much larger. JohnFrancis’s “small” petroleum to oil heat exchanger is still a lot of pipe segments. 

I’m not sure how to do some of the steps efficiently, or even if it’s possible. You’d like heat from the outgoing very hot sour gas to transfer to the incoming crude oil, heating the oil and cooling the sour gas. The problem is a pipe / pool heat exchanger doesn’t seem possible above 400 C. The crude oil’s not safe in pipes above 400 C because it’s going to change to petroleum, and you can’t pump the sour gas into pipes until it’s below 275 C. You need some other kind of heat exchanger.

Transferring heat from sour gas to the outgoing natural gas, cooling the sour gas and heating the natural gas, is clearly fairly easy to do. Just have a setup like Lifegrow’s, where a metal plate transfers heat to boil the methane, and a radiant pipe with natural gas looping through the sour gas transfers heat.

 

[CrixOMix]

36 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

@CrixOMix that seems pretty reasonable.  However, I’m pretty sure it’s possible to create a much more thermally efficient method, like one of @JohnFrancis’s oil boilers. He’s demonstrated builds that don’t require space materials, but which still do most of the heating of oil up to 400 C by transferring the heat from the outgoing petroleum using radiant pipes and a counter-flow heat exchanger. A good sour gas boiler should do the same thing, transfer most of the heat from the hot sour gas to the incoming oil.

You also want to use the outgoing cold natural gas to cool the sour gas, instead of cooling a polluted water pool as you suggest. That’s a second counterflow heat exchanger.

You can see both of those steps in @Lifegrow‘s build. The aquatuner cools the late-stage sour gas, and transfers the heat to the incoming oil, boiling it to sour gas. Heat from the sour gas is what converts the methane into natural gas, not a pool of polluted water. At roughly the same time, heat transfers from the sour gas to outgoing natural gas in a radiant pipe, cooling the sour gas and heating the natural gas. Next if the sour gas is still very hot, some of that heat transfers to a steam turbine. Finally, the sour gas enters the cooling loop powered by the aquatuner.

A build that didn’t rely on an aquatuner is going to look much different, and be much larger. JohnFrancis’s “small” petroleum to oil heat exchanger is still a lot of pipe segments. 

I’m not sure how to do some of the steps efficiently, or even if it’s possible. You’d like heat from the outgoing very hot sour gas to transfer to the incoming crude oil, heating the oil and cooling the sour gas. The problem is a pipe / pool heat exchanger doesn’t seem possible above 400 C. The crude oil’s not safe in pipes above 400 C because it’s going to change to petroleum, and you can’t pump the sour gas into pipes until it’s below 275 C. You need some other kind of heat exchanger.

Transferring heat from sour gas to the outgoing natural gas, cooling the sour gas and heating the natural gas, is clearly fairly easy to do. Just have a setup like Lifegrow’s, where a metal plate transfers heat to boil the methane, and a radiant pipe with natural gas looping through the sour gas transfers heat.

 

But you can't pump out the hot sour gas without space materials. So you can't create a counterflow where you use that hot gas to do anything until you've cooled it off enough without any pumps.

I do think using the cold natgas to help cool off the sour gas is fine, as that would save you some of your thermo regulator power, but the natgas is at -160, so then you'd need to figure out a way to have the cold natgas cool the sour gas before the cold hydrogen cools the sour gas, which could require another whole room, or some weird snake thing. And the pwater from the generator provides more than enough DTUs (because it comes out at the same temp the generator is at) to heat the natgas. So yes you're losing cooling power, but I'd have to do the math if it ends up saving you anything to do it the way you're talking about, as it would require at least one gas pump which is another .48J per gram cost.

I also think you'd rather use the heat from the volcano to make the oil go all the way to gas. Because then more of that heat turns to steam, rather than heating your oil/petrol, so you use much more heat from your magma, sure, but you end up getting more power in the end, as all of the natgas cooling down to about 150 is turned into steam. And after doing the math, one regular volcano supplies enough heat to provide 7,170 watts constantly, so I can't really see why you would need to be more efficient with that heat. Maybe I haven't played the game far enough but 7 kilowatts of constant generation seems like more than enough power for the rest of the game.

Also, as you mentioned, there's some serious issue with phase state changes because without space materials or super coolant, there's nothing that can handle those ranges of temperatures.

[Abt9]

Last I tested, it seemed like sour gas and petroleum can transfer heat quite fast without radiant pipes. Need to test the design without piping there.

Btw gas pump is too weak, it seems like it's good to avoid if you deal with high production rate.

[Abt9]

Wish I could play the game now, so that I can design the thing =/ but I need to wait for half a day..

[Gus Smedstad]

3 hours ago, CrixOMix said:

But you can't pump out the hot sour gas without space materials. So you can't create a counterflow where you use that hot gas to do anything until you've cooled it off enough without any pumps.

Correct. I said as much in paragraph 5, where I said:

3 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

you can’t pump the sour gas into pipes until it’s below 275 C. You need some other kind of heat exchanger.

Pipes aren't an option for the sour gas <-> crude oil exchange. Pipe & liquid aren't the only options for heat exchangers. The most obvious being just running a row of sour gas tiles over a row of crude oil tiles. Someone with more experience with experimenting with heat exchangers could say more.

It's not difficult to have the cold natural gas cool the sour gas before it encounters the cold hydrogen (or possibly cold liquid oxygen). You can see exactly that in Lifegrow's build. If your objection is size... a large build is pretty difficult to escape if  you want efficiency without thermium or supercoolant. You can make a very small oil boiler prior to space, or an efficient oil boiler prior to space, but you cant' do both.

I'm thinking about heat efficiency because it's important with oil boilers. On further examination, it's not as important with a sour gas converter. The peak temperature is higher (540 C vs. 400 C), but you're almost certainly converting less mass. A oil boiler's goal is 10kg/s, a gas converter goal is probably 1 kg/s natural gas and thus 1.5 kg/s of oil. Less total thermal mass and thus less heat required.

1 hour ago, Abt9 said:

Btw gas pump is too weak, it seems like it's good to avoid if you deal with high production rate.

You can't avoid gas pumps. Natural gas generators accept gas through pipes, and there's no way to get natural gas into a pipe without a gas pump.

[Abt9]

2 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

You can't avoid gas pumps. Natural gas generators accept gas through pipes, and there's no way to get natural gas into a pipe without a gas pump.

Oh welp. Forgot that Natural Gas Generators can only process 90g/s at a time, so it is guaranteed to take loads of space. No point in processing crude oil to natural gas at a rate of 10kg/s then =/

Anyway I'd go for 1kg/s, I think this one would be fairly small, considering the sheer size of natural gas generators.

 

Btw what is really hard about oil boiler? Couldn't you just push in some heat into it until it reaches vaporization point, and cool it afterwards? ..oh wait. Petrol isn't a gas.

[Gus Smedstad]

This is an aside, but:

3 hours ago, CrixOMix said:

7 kilowatts of constant generation seems like more than enough power for the rest of the game.

It's not. But that doesn't mean you need a sour gas converter, or steam power from a volcano.

I stopped my QOL 2 colony at around cycle 1350, and it consumed around 22-24 kw on average. I didn't have a sour gas converter, a 10 kg/s oil boiler plus steam power from various sources was enough to generate that much. I had a magma volcano, but I never tapped it for energy.

You're guaranteed 2 oil wells, and 3 is common. That's 6.6 - 9.9 kg/s of oil. Converted to petroleum in a boiler, and burned in boosted petroleum generators, that's 15 kw. Plus energy from natural gas from the oil wells, and natural gas geysers.

If you're building a sour gas converter, it's because you need more energy efficiency from your renewable sources of oil, OR you want more polluted water byproduct from that oil. The math is something like 4x as much polluted water from oil converted to natural gas than from petroleum.

16 minutes ago, Abt9 said:

Btw what is really hard about oil boiler? 

Oil boilers are another topic, even if it's related. They're much easier than sour gas converters. Heat efficiency is important in them, because a 10 kg/s oil boiler is (400 C - 80 C) * 10 kg/s * 1.76 DTU/g/K = 5,600 kDTU/s if you brute force it. That's far more energy than you get from a volcano, and 9.5x what you get from a thermium aquatuner running water. To get 10kg/s you MUST transfer heat to the incoming oil, rather than converting it to electricity in a steam turbine.

[Abt9]

Ah, heat efficiency.

Btw I started working on this, it seems like oil boiling/cooling part is easily doable and expandable, while cooling part isn't. The budget is quite high that super coolant is indeed desirable.

I'm going for cooling methane using aquatuners, let's see how it goes.

[Abt9]

Another update, oil heating part got quite efficient.

[Abt9]

Feels like I did it, this is doable if liquid oxygen is available.

Seems like 500~600g/s isn't that hard, I think it won't be that different for 1~2kg/s ones.

 

Will post it when I refined the design.

[Abt9]

Now I wonder, maybe oil cooker is something every interested player get to create in the end? It seems quite easy to create one which is quite compact(at least smaller than the volume NG generators require) and good enough to produce electricity.

[Tonyroid]

Don't ask me how to do it without space age materials. Nevertheless, I made this 10kg per second highly efficient cooker. It's a bit overkill, but all the principles about heat exchange and efficiency are clean if you are interested in them.

The first 10 minutes are a quick tour/overview.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

4 minutes ago, Tonyroid said:

Don't ask me how to do it without space age materials. Nevertheless, I made this 10kg per second highly efficient cooker. It's a bit overkill, but all the principles about heat exchange and efficiency are clean if you are interested in them.

The only way I've found to do it without space materials is.. complicated.  You need a high energy source of heat, such as a volcano, to boil the oil. You also need to make sure that any of your equipment (pumps, aquatuners, etc) stay under 300c so you can use steel.  Its definitely possible, but only if you can use magma, molten iron, or molten copper as your heating source.

[hackcasual]

16 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

The only way I've found to do it without space materials is.. complicated.  You need a high energy source of heat, such as a volcano, to boil the oil. You also need to make sure that any of your equipment (pumps, aquatuners, etc) stay under 300c so you can use steel.  Its definitely possible, but only if you can use magma, molten iron, or molten copper as your heating source.

The heating is as simple as digging out the abyssalite in the oil biome and letting the oil and magma mix. You'll end up with literal tons of sour gas that way. As I'm building my late game power supplies (with super coolant), instead of building an integrated sour gas cooker, I first build just the cooling side, and pump out my sour gas pocket.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Just now, hackcasual said:

The heating is as simple as digging out the abyssalite in the oil biome and letting the oil and magma mix. You'll end up with literal tons of sour gas that way. As I'm building my late game power supplies (with super coolant), instead of building an integrated sour gas cooker, I first build just the cooling side, and pump out my sour gas pocket.

Heating isn't complicated.  Cooling it down without super coolant and other space materials is where it gets a bit complex.  You have to do it in stages or you'll have state changes within pipes.  I've done it before, but space materials make things MUCH simpler.

[Craigjw]

Just so you know, you can liquidise O2 and get to -190 without space materials, I have achieved this myself, it's a bit of a faff, but doable.  One could probably use air conditioners on Hydrogen to get liquid Hydrogen, but at that point, I found it easier to just use super coolant.

[Abt9]

I found that making a liquid oxygen isn't that hard, unless you want to liquidify huge amount of oxygen at once. Also you can use LOx itself to cool itself down.