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Ethanol mass production - energy balance


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Hi folks !

I come to a concern I have.

1 petro gen is producing 2000W (3000W tuned-up).

4 ethanol distillers will produce enough for 1 petro gen (2000g/s). 960W

1 gas pump will catch the CO² for 1 petro gen (500g/s). 240W

2 gas pump (not full time) will catch up the CO² Ethanol distillers production (669g/s) : 320W

18W of a liquid pump capacity is used to pump out the pH²O from the petro gen. Let's round up to 20W (and I'm moderate) because even with liquid pressure sensor, you can have a small packet at the end, so not pumping at full capacity and wasting W/g pump ratio.

 

So it does mean that for 1 petro gen, you'll need 1540W. So only 460W left.

(Dup-time can do) It could increase, if I take into consideration sweeper & conveyor to bring up the lumb.

(Dup-time can do with slickster) It could increase if I consider carbon skimmers to get rid of the CO².

(Dup-time can do) It could increase, if I take into consideration sweepers & conveyor for polluted dirt.

(Dup cannot do) It will generate 40kDTU/s of heat. I do not include here the heat deletion.

 

It feels unbalanced. My last base is relying a lot on manufactured ethanol for power. So much watt spent to produce 460W, my heavy wire is already struggling. And I do not even take care enough of the CO². 15kg/tile everywhere on the map. 140 Slicksters are not enough at all to consume the CO², so 15 skimmers and 3 water sieves have been added.

What do you think guys about it ? Am I the ony one to find it rather nasty ?

I'm tuning-up my generators already, but cannot really reach the stability I'm aiming for.

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The way I look at it is ethanol processing creates many byproducts, not just power.  You can utilize these other byproducts as you see fit and how you balance them determines what you get out of the process.  I really enjoy this aspect of ethanol processing.

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1 minute ago, Ecu said:

The way I look at it is ethanol processing creates many byproducts, not just power.  You can utilize these other byproducts as you see fit and how you balance them determines what you get out of the process.  I really enjoy this aspect of ethanol processing.

agree.  Not a bad way to generate extra PW....although I think wild peppers is now better option there.

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14 minutes ago, CannedSmeef said:

Keep in mind that wild trees produce a ludicrous amount of free lumber.  It'd be pretty broken if your energy was truly unlimited AND stable AND high output.

But ethanol distiller are consumming a lot, so the relation is not the same. Also, conveyor system must work more, as there's more mass.

 

9 minutes ago, Ecu said:

The way I look at it is ethanol processing creates many byproducts, not just power.  You can utilize these other byproducts as you see fit and how you balance them determines what you get out of the process.  I really enjoy this aspect of ethanol processing.

The byproducts feels a bit useless to me, in such quantity. pDirt, pH²O, etc...

 

I understand your arguments guys, and I thought the same when I put in place my setups on this base, but the fact is I'm swimming into CO² ^^

I think I'll start to dump it into space, until I reach a proper pressure.

I should be worrying for nothing, everything is cool, power production/use seems to be balanced, petro gen are not stoppable by pressure, but as said I feel so much stuff around this production chain, it's weird.

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The waste products from ethanol production do seem pretty excessive. The old CO2 system was extremely skewed towards low production. Duplicants inhale 100g O2 and output 2g CO2. Coal generators intake 1000g coal and output 20g CO2. With the wood burner outputting what, 170g(?) it's already an order of magnitude higher than even the worst options.

With the big transmuting bugs fixed, the greatest source of CO2 simply vanishing no longer exists.

There's definitely a case of design drift going on. What worked before is no longer accepted, but what works now doesn't fit into what worked before. Expect more number tweaks.

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Gas pumps should use less power they suck so little and normally we endup needing 2 for each setup making them far less efficient " not even taking into account the filters if needed.

But yes the ethanol is a complementary power positive process, it helps you to keep food and water too, very slowly but helps.

 

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38 minutes ago, natanstarke said:

Gas pumps should use less power they suck so little and normally we endup needing 2 for each setup making them far less efficient " not even taking into account the filters if needed.

But yes the ethanol is a complementary power positive process, it helps you to keep food and water too, very slowly but helps.

 

the pumps range and no rotation made it worst(you must build it non-top-left side,unlike water pump where building it at the bottom of the pool is most effective.Gas pumps need to build closer to the center of the room.

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4 hours ago, CannedSmeef said:

Keep in mind that wild trees produce a ludicrous amount of free lumber.  It'd be pretty broken if your energy was truly unlimited AND stable AND high output.

Baking crude oil is the most efficient alternative, running an oil refinery is the 2nd. In terms of net power running an oil refinery is much better. In terms of dupe labor running an oil refinery is much better.

 

Currently, you should only distill ethanol if you're literally btapping out your oil supply or don't have enough water to run oil wells.

 

Doesn't seem like a meaningful choice for most situations in its current state.

 

 

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@OxCD If you put your factory close to open space... well so that gas can leak out at the top of the factory into space, then you will not have to deal with any of the CO2. ...If you make the factory below actual space with just leakage on the topside you won't have to do a complicated space cooling solution for machinery and can cool it the old fashioned way.

That does put the plant far away from where you most probably have your trees so some power need to be used for automated transport of lumber but won't be much. So you can probably net around 1KW this way.....

Space is the ultimate place to get rid of stuff you don't want..

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1 hour ago, Strygald said:

Why do you even need gas pumps to capture the CO2? just build an adequate number of carbon skimmers nearby.

Skimming is a waste, as it doesn't produce anything. With petro gen, I've enough pH²O for everything, so much more should be a waste. Sieving it to get back your clean H²O is a waste, as you started with clean H²O before the skimmer, and it only produces pDirt, thing you don't need anymore with ethanol distillers.

 

My main point remains. For 460W benefit, you need 9 buildings (not including conveyor, CO² uses, ect...). It's a lot of ressources. And a lot of time to builg big setup, for 460W only.

I keep thinking it needs some balance.

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52 minutes ago, OxCD said:

Skimming is a waste, as it doesn't produce anything. With petro gen, I've enough pH²O for everything, so much more should be a waste. Sieving it to get back your clean H²O is a waste, as you started with clean H²O before the skimmer, and it only produces pDirt, thing you don't need anymore with ethanol distillers.

Do your generators run non-stop? Mine don't, so they don't produce nearly enough pwater "for everything".

54 minutes ago, OxCD said:

My main point remains. For 460W benefit, you need 9 buildings (not including conveyor, CO² uses, ect...). It's a lot of ressources. And a lot of time to builg big setup, for 460W only.

I keep thinking it needs some balance.

1460W, actually, since you can't really ignore the tune-up buff.

So, 1460W, pwater for your peppers or reeds (or even oxygen via deodorizers), pdirt for your lime farm via pokeshells, and infinite fuel to drive the whole setup.

I have no idea what you are complaining about.

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48 minutes ago, OxCD said:

Skimming is a waste, as it doesn't produce anything. With petro gen, I've enough pH²O for everything, so much more should be a waste. Sieving it to get back your clean H²O is a waste, as you started with clean H²O before the skimmer, and it only produces pDirt, thing you don't need anymore with ethanol distillers.

 

My main point remains. For 460W benefit, you need 9 buildings (not including conveyor, CO² uses, ect...). It's a lot of ressources. And a lot of time to builg big setup, for 460W only.

I keep thinking it needs some balance.

Yes this system evaluated alone is weak is in the combo of things it is good also slicksters can have eternal food and you extra meat/oil/petrol/polluted water. Another thing to be noted, conveyor loaders also use a lot of energy and you'll need loaders in tree farms and loaders to get the polluted dirt and send somewhere with water/pokeshell ranch. Also this setup produces lots of heat so heat will be needed.

 

 

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Initially seal the generator room and just let the pressure build to something truly stupid. I think my 4 gen room got to about 400kg CO2.

Then when you have got slickers in the oil biome dig a channel from the oil biome straight up to your generator room and then crack that store of carbon to flow down to the slickers.

Also I don't collect the pdirt from stills till late game, I just put a deodorizer at the door so I get oxygen and clay production.

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44 minutes ago, M.C. said:

Do your generators run non-stop?

 

Yes, nearly.

44 minutes ago, M.C. said:

1460W, actually, since you can't really ignore the tune-up buff.

You can, if your dups just don't have time to tune up everything. I've 22 dups, but still, they cannot tune every gen every day. And even the more skilled operator takes a lot of time to tune up only one gen.

44 minutes ago, M.C. said:

So, 1460W, pwater for your peppers or reeds (or even oxygen via deodorizers), pdirt for your lime farm via pokeshells, and infinite fuel to drive the whole setup.

Peppers are not consuming that much, and you don't need that much domesticated pepper neither. My dups already got 50+ moral, I skilled them only for 30/33, as it covers all errands they are assigned to. So pepper for moral is not essential here. I've got lime automatically  via a lot of pacu below my printer. And I don't need oxygen since electrolyzer are covering it and hydrogen is powering them via H gen.

 

18 minutes ago, Harlequin80 said:

Initially seal the generator room and just let the pressure build to something truly stupid. I think my 4 gen room got to about 400kg CO2.

Then when you have got slickers in the oil biome dig a channel from the oil biome straight up to your generator room and then crack that store of carbon to flow down to the slickers.

I've nearly 200 slicksters , it doesn't cover at all the production. Then if I seal my rooms, dups will have no access to tune it up as much as possible. Or I'll need waterlock instead of complete sealing... That's an idea.

image.thumb.png.cf554a627dbc565b8d06ecca7bd0300c.png

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I don't think the building requirement or meager net power gain after building everything is the problem, it's just that the CO2 removal tools, aside of slicksters, are balanced around the old power generators and dupe breathing, which don't output much really. My hope is they buff air pump and skimmer intake together by 100% (without increasing power or water use) and at least double CO2 output of dupes, natural gas generators, and coal generators.

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It would be nice to tone down the CO2 production to take less than a full colony's worth of effort to maintain. For now, try building a space chimney and vent that pollution into space. It's too much for normal tools to handle.

It's like, steampunk asteroids or something.

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This is the setup I used, everything is automated, dups only spend time tuning up gen, flipping compost and harvesting tree, the 2 door pump keep the CO2 pressure in the room around 7-8 kg per tile.
One thing I found out when running this is that despite generators being kept at around 5-10oC, the temperature of the polluted water pool below keeps rising (to nearly 30oC at one point). I had to slap down another aquatuner to cool it down so that I could feed it back to the tree.
I dont remember reading anything in the patch notes about the output temp of generators now match the input temp and not the generators temp ???

Capture.PNG

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1 hour ago, OxCD said:

Peppers are not consuming that much, and you don't need that much domesticated pepper neither. My dups already got 50+ moral, I skilled them only for 30/33, as it covers all errands they are assigned to. So pepper for moral is not essential here. I've got lime automatically  via a lot of pacu below my printer. And I don't need oxygen since electrolyzer are covering it and hydrogen is powering them via H gen.

[...]

I've nearly 200 slicksters

[...]

Ok, I think I know what got you all confused.

You've built a traditional base and you're wondering how the ethanol setup could fit into it. It simply doesn't. The ethanol setup really shines when you start on it early and build your base around it. Klei gave us an alternative to how we've been doing things all along. This is great, but it's also not something you can plug into an arbitrary -- especially well-developed! -- base and expect it to make sense.

Start a new game and make your ethanol setup its centerpiece. Its power will be more obvious.

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2 hours ago, OxCD said:

I've nearly 200 slicksters , it doesn't cover at all the production.

200 groomed slicksters in theory should be enough to cover 8 ethanol distillers and 4 petrol gens running full-time since both output/use exactly 2000 kg CO2 per cycle. I dont know why it was not enough in your case (unless the database was wrong about slickster consuming 20 kg CO2 per cycle part).

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4 hours ago, Ixiah said:

200 groomed slicksters in theory should be enough to cover 8 ethanol distillers and 4 petrol gens running full-time since both output/use exactly 2000 kg CO2 per cycle. I dont know why it was not enough in your case (unless the database was wrong about slickster consuming 20 kg CO2 per cycle part).

Not all are groomed yet ^^ it's a lot. Working on it !

 

4 hours ago, M.C. said:

Start a new game and make your ethanol setup its centerpiece. Its power will be more obvious.

You've put your finger on something, I never build thematic bases. I'm always trying to build everything everywhere, to cover all scopes of the game in everygame. That's where my pleasure is, but that could be an extra difficulty, I agree.

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6 hours ago, Ixiah said:

This is the setup I used, everything is automated, dups only spend time tuning up gen, flipping compost and harvesting tree, the 2 door pump keep the CO2 pressure in the room around 7-8 kg per tile.
One thing I found out when running this is that despite generators being kept at around 5-10oC, the temperature of the polluted water pool below keeps rising (to nearly 30oC at one point). I had to slap down another aquatuner to cool it down so that I could feed it back to the tree.
I dont remember reading anything in the patch notes about the output temp of generators now match the input temp and not the generators temp ???

Capture.PNG

Yep I have something similar, except that I installed 4 distiller / gen, to be able to run at full time, and I would say it was needed ^^ The only difference is the door pump system. I didn't planned anything to compress the CO². I'm trying to play without those systems, as a matter of principle, but I think I will change sides and plan a door compression system or, better, a bead-pump, to suck all this CO².

I definitely inflict me to much rules out of principle... I should change that I think.

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