useless o2 Is there a way to use useless O2 that you don't need?

[Chthonicone]

I'm trying to figure out a way to save my colony, I can't even make petroleum or natural gas at this point. I'm out of coal, and really can't afford to feed hatches anymore, and starting a turbine build on magma would require moving or using a ton of oil.

I've resorted to hamster wheels again.

I've never lost a colony due to lack of power before, and the only thing I can think of to salvage this is to electrolyze water and use that to generate power.

Problem is I don't need Oxygen, I have plenty, let alone the amount I'd get from the size of the build I'd need. What can I do with it? I'm not going to space yet, so Oxite really won't help me much, and storage is only putting off the problem for tomorrow.

To be clear, I'm looking for about 4 kW of power at least.

[FantasticMoose]

Ranch a fuckton of dense pufts and condense o2 to oxylite?
Keep base pressure high enough and you won't even have to pick it up yet.
That is, if you're adamant on using electrolyzers.

Alternatively you pick up another 10 dupes, and lock them in a power room for a couple hundred cycles, and just feed them mealwood.
Once you're ready to deal with power in some other way, you'll have high athletics dupes ready to skill into whatever.

[Xuhybrid]

I was in a similar situation on Oasisse with no oil biome or natural gas vents. You should at least have an oil reservoir and that alone, even if you manually convert the oil into petroleum, should provide enough power. It's not efficient but combine that with the natural gas from converting water into oil and you have something viable early and mid game.

I tried ethanol production and sage hatches for coal but the demand was just too high to be reliable, though i'm sure they helped.

[Chthonicone]

It's a hard feeling when you get a good ways ahead, running on 4-5 kW of power with many cool systems going, and I spent about 20 cycles taming a gold volcano, only to find out, oh, I'm out of coal.

1 minute ago, Xuhybrid said:

I was in a similar situation on Oasisse with no oil biome or natural gas vents. You should at least have an oil reservoir and that alone, even if you manually convert the oil into petroleum, should provide enough power. It's not efficient but combine that with the natural gas from converting water into oil and you have something viable early and mid game.

I have many tons of oil blocking me off from lava. Problem is I need more power than I have to make it into petroleum and natural gas. It feels more like a power sink than an actual source at this point. Maybe if I could automate the oil refineries it'd help, but why do they have to be dupe run?

[Xenologist]

Sourgas boilers and condensers are superior to both. It's even water positive with an oil well!

[Xuhybrid]

I mean, outside of dupe time it's only going to add power. But if you have a volcano you can design an oil boiler with steel tech level, as long as you cool down your petroleum before pumping it.

[TheEvilMango]

Well if power is your problem I suggest changing your supply before u run out. When u r sitting on about 60tons of coal start looking for a new power source. That way ubarent panicking. I do the same with all systems and it helps alot. Now to solutions. I wouldn't recommend converting water to power but if u need to u can always build a gas compressor or crusher for the O2 or just vent it. Or if u can survive long enough a shine bug reactor will take care of all your needs

[Chthonicone]

19 minutes ago, Xenologist said:

Sourgas boilers and condensers are superior to both. It's even water positive with an oil well!

The extreme cooling is a bit out of my league at the moment, but I though that crude oil boiled into sour gas. I didn't realize that if just heated it turns directly into petroleum. That's a definite possibility there. Just have to design a system to control how much heat gets into an oil reservoir, and then use the resulting petroleum for power.

I kind of never got into oil much before, instead going the ethanol path, but that way isn't very power efficient, and produces far too much CO2.

18 minutes ago, Xuhybrid said:

I mean, outside of dupe time it's only going to add power. But if you have a volcano you can design an oil boiler with steel tech level, as long as you cool down your petroleum before pumping it.

The problem is I'd have to completely redesign my system to make sure that the refineries get power first, not last like they seem to get now. That along with the fact that the refineries are in a portion of my base that isn't hospitable without exosuit limits how many dupes I can have working them at a time. The oil I have is ~ 180C, I was actually looking for a way to cool down the area when I realized I had power issues.

17 minutes ago, TheEvilMango said:

Well if power is your problem I suggest changing your supply before u run out. When u r sitting on about 60tons of coal start looking for a new power source. That way ubarent panicking. I do the same with all systems and it helps alot. Now to solutions. I wouldn't recommend converting water to power but if u need to u can always build a gas compressor or crusher for the O2 or just vent it. Or if u can survive long enough a shine bug reactor will take care of all your needs

I had a strong hatch farm, and in the past on Arborea, giving up dirt to make tons of sage hatches gives you literally so much coal. I kind of over estimated them on Oceanea. I didn't pay it much mind though in my search for metal so I could advance until it was too late.

Anyways, to all of you, I have 3 cool steam geysers, and literally so much salt water. This is why I look at electrolysis. I tried digging up to space to vent the excess O2, but I've literally got oceans in the way that I can't cross without flooding things. If I lose this base, I don't mind so much, I've learned so much this time, but I've not given up yet.

The magma is very close to the oil I have. I'm going to try heating it into petroleum that way, and then pumping that to some petroleum generators. I'll let you know how it works out.

[0xFADE]

Making it oxylite or liquid oxygen for future space launches.  Dense pufts will convert a lot of oxygen.  It doesn't show up in the reports because it is only tracking dupe consumption but you can easily start losing oxygen pressure if you ranch a few rooms worth of them.  You need oxylite for a few rocket launches anyway.

 

[Chthonicone]

1 minute ago, 0xFADE said:

Making it oxylite or liquid oxygen for future space launches.  Dense pufts will convert a lot of oxygen.  It doesn't show up in the reports because it is only tracking dupe consumption but you can easily start losing oxygen pressure if you ranch a few rooms worth of them.  You need oxylite for a few rocket launches anyway.

 

Got a few oceans to go through to get to the surface. Do you think I have what it takes to be the terror from the deep?

[0xFADE]

There is an entire surface to conquer.  Lots of power up there too.  You can try digging around the corners of the lakes to get to the surface.  It doesn't really matter how inefficient that part is.  Once you are above the lake you can drill down through it with retaining walls if you have to.

Oil will hold back a lot of water too.  I don't think that was their intent with water locks.

[Chthonicone]

To be fair, I find water locks exploitative, and I avoid them. I'm sure that eventually they'll get patch or something. No amount of liquid should hold back infinite pressure, a vacuum should pull that water right in too, right up the tunnel.

Consider me old fashioned, but that's how I learned about gas deletion if it's pressure gets low enough.

[Miravlix]

Seems simple to design the O2 creation to stop if you have a surplus. It would save on power and whatever other resources is involved.

 

If you use O2 to make hydrogen and O2 being a waste product, you might want to consider why you need that much hydrogen, because it shouldn't really be hard to create more hydrogen than you can use from normal O2 making.

[Chthonicone]

18 minutes ago, Miravlix said:

Seems simple to design the O2 creation to stop if you have a surplus. It would save on power and whatever other resources is involved.

 

If you use O2 to make hydrogen and O2 being a waste product, you might want to consider why you need that much hydrogen, because it shouldn't really be hard to create more hydrogen than you can use from normal O2 making.

The point is, I'd be doing this for power, not for O2. I have all the O2 I need right now. The extra O2 produced by this is not needed for anything and I have nowhere to put it all.

[Dosephshih]

i am curious why you cannot make petroleum but you need so much power (at the order of 4KW).

Even if you vent the oxygen, the power generated by hydrogen generator is only 1200W with tune up. It is equal to about 1kg/s of water consumption.

Or do you have ethanol on your map? it can provide the power for some time. And tune up is very important in my feeling, especially for petroleum generator, you get extra 1000w for almost free.

[Chthonicone]

50 minutes ago, Dosephshih said:

i am curious why you cannot make petroleum but you need so much power (at the order of 4KW).

Even if you vent the oxygen, the power generated by hydrogen generator is only 1200W with tune up. It is equal to about 1kg/s of water consumption.

Or do you have ethanol on your map? it can provide the power for some time. And tune up is very important in my feeling, especially for petroleum generator, you get extra 1000w for almost free.

I have an almost automated setup for making steel, tons of shipping going on, etc. I also don't have too much manpower with only 10 dupes. My base is also starting to heat up even with the insulation, and I have to move to get a cooling loop going for it.

Honestly, I experimented a lot in this run.

Huh? Another thought. I could have not only used petroleum as coolant, but also used that for power when it got too hot instead of cooling it. I never thought about that.

[0xFADE]

They went the other way with liquid locks.  Critters used to travel through them.  They don't likely have any intention of taking them away.

[Majestix]

1 hour ago, Chthonicone said:

I have an almost automated setup for making steel, tons of shipping going on, etc.

You should probably start by disabling all your steel production and automated shipping, and get petroleum generators going. Use wheels to kickstart the generators if you have to, you will not have to do it for long. Build up a decent reserve of petroleum before you reenable the steel production. 

[Dosephshih]

i think the steel production up-time is not very high. In one of my previous game, I connect it by battery and automation, which make it only use the excess power for production of steel. It would not build up the power demand at some very short period of time.

A hamster wheel only produce 400w, while if the dupe run a oil refinery producing 5kg of petroleum/s, which can run 2 petroleum generator. That is far too more power generated.

I think 10 dupes should not be the major problem, it depends on how you distribute the works. Ranching is too time consuming, where i don't suggest to ranch for coal. instead, "Operate" is far more important at Mid game, for the oil / metal refinery, tune up, oil well, crusher.

btw, which type of map are you in?

[Majestix]

Also, I think steel production can actually be power positive if you use crude oil as cooland and pipe it through a steam room to run a turbine. Don't just pipe it through ones, set up a temp sensor controlled loop that circles the crude around until you have extracted most of the heat, before sending it back to the metal refinery. And like you were recommended elsewhere, you can have a buffer tank with coolant to average out temperatures and maintain the uptime on the metal refinery. 

[Argelle]

7 hours ago, 0xFADE said:

Making it oxylite or liquid oxygen for future space launches.  Dense pufts will convert a lot of oxygen.  It doesn't show up in the reports because it is only tracking dupe consumption but you can easily start losing oxygen pressure if you ranch a few rooms worth of them.  You need oxylite for a few rocket launches anyway.

 

What a great idea !

Spoiler

(I did steal it to use it right away in my game)

By the time I finish building an oxilyte refinery, the farm with puft was already running for a few cycles, and *magic* I now have the half ton of oxylite necessary to switch from steam rocket to petroleum one (and discard of an excess of unwanted O²)

Thanks @0xFADE

[chemie]

solar?

[beowulf2010]

9 hours ago, Chthonicone said:

To be fair, I find water locks exploitative, and I avoid them. I'm sure that eventually they'll get patch or something. No amount of liquid should hold back infinite pressure, a vacuum should pull that water right in too, right up the tunnel.

So, you'll probably not want to do this either, but just in case, here's a thread that I started that has some really good advice on techniques for draining liquid deposits from below using infinite storage. If nothing else, you could use it to get to space quickly. 

 

[blackbellamy]

That's weird that people need special techniques to deal with liquid deposits.  You dig out an area where you want the liquid to be then puncture the deposit and it flows down.  I usually combine all the free-standing liquids into big pools below my base that way.  Here's all the salt water, here's the ethanol, and so on.  I don't care if some of my base gets wet that way or whatever, that's what the janitor is for.

[0xFADE]

I think you might underestimate just how much ocean is on an ocean map. I usually relocate liquid that way too.