Can I do a Petroleum/Sour Gas Boiler with a volcano and adjacent nullifier?

[Foefaller]

Started a new base on a Volcanea Asteroid, seed 999559137. After insulating my starting area from the veins directly below me, I dig to the left and down a bit trying to find a way around it and stumble upon a Leaky Oil Fissure, an Anti-Entropy Nullifier, and a pair of Volcanoes not even 20 tiles from each other:

Now, I know a normal Petroleum/Sour Gas boiler takes space materials, since everything needs to be hotter than steel can take or cold enough to freeze any of the room-temperature liquids you can find, but since the Nullifier is right there, and can (eventually) get cold enough for methane, would it be possible to pull it off without any thermium or super coolant? Doesn't need to be very efficient, as I'm actually going for the Super Sustainable achievement for this base, so this mostly a chance to learn something and make some of the fuel I need for rocketry in a unique way for me.

Even if Natural Gas is too time consuming/cumbersome, I'd like to be able to get some petroleum without a refinery, because until I manage get down to the oil biome and make a home for a dupe there (the two paths around the vein, while "cool" enough for atmo suits, would melt transit tubes, and are pretty far from the base. Plus this map has the buried oil feature, so someone will need to get down there regularly to release pressure from the oil well) this is pretty much all the oil I'm going to get, and I'd like to make the most out of it.

[Tonyroid]

I've never done it but I've done a LOT of natural gas cooking. I think in this scenario your capacity would be quite limited because a nullifier has a limited cooling capacity. Even with very efficient heat exchanges it wouldn't be able to keep up. You'll need to build the entire apparatus so it waits while the nullifier catches up.

[Yalp]

Just a few (rough) numbers done with https://oni-assistant.com/tools/coolingcalculator reveal how much throughput you get for a specific temperature delta the AETN has to accomplish.

Spoiler

The  start -> target temps are only relevant for the delta, no need to bother with entering the condensation temperature here.

If your AETN has to cool the sour gas by 40°C you should be able to convert about 1 kg/s.

Double the delta (80°C) and you can still do 0.5 kg/s.

If you wanted to convert an entire oil well's output (3.333 kg/s) you'd need to reduce the delta to 12-13 °C.

So a lot of it depends on your pre-cooling.

 

7 hours ago, Foefaller said:

I know a normal Petroleum/Sour Gas boiler takes space materials

You are right about what most people would consider "normal", but you can definitely build a SG-boiler without space mats. 

You'd have to rely on something like a Volcano or a Metal Refinery for heat.

Cooling would be done with Thermo Regulators and h2. It's way less efficient, yes, but considering the amount of power you get out of it, it's still viable.

[Voigt]

Using only steel and an AETN ist entirly possible to boil Oil to Sourgas and then cool it down to methan. I do it myself, using the magma core of the asteroid to generate 450K Sour Gas, which I cool down to 100K purly with the AETN. So a gigantic Temp Delta in comparison.

But I also don't work continuesly, but instead I pump a room directly under the AETN connected trough Lead Metal tiles with 20kg per Tile Sourgas pumped from the core. A liquid pump transfers the liquid methan when it forms to a room next door, also connected with Lead Tiles where it boils to Nat. Gas. There a Gas Pump transfers it into Gastanks and from there into Nat. Gas Generators.

[badgamer123]

i still waiting the day sour gas byproduct have a use...

4 hours ago, Yalp said:

Just a few (rough) numbers done with https://oni-assistant.com/tools/coolingcalculator reveal how much throughput you get for a specific temperature delta the AETN has to accomplish.

  Reveal hidden contents

The  start -> target temps are only relevant for the delta, no need to bother with entering the condensation temperature here.

If your AETN has to cool the sour gas by 40°C you should be able to convert about 1 kg/s.

Double the delta (80°C) and you can still do 0.5 kg/s.

If you wanted to convert an entire oil well's output (3.333 kg/s) you'd need to reduce the delta to 12-13 °C.

So a lot of it depends on your pre-cooling.

 

You are right about what most people would consider "normal", but you can definitely build a SG-boiler without space mats. 

You'd have to rely on something like a Volcano or a Metal Refinery for heat.

Cooling would be done with Thermo Regulators and h2. It's way less efficient, yes, but considering the amount of power you get out of it, it's still viable.

if you got 1kg or Nat gas there is no power problem anywhere

I never know how to use that cooling calaulator

[biopon]

It's possible and might even be worth it.

It's not too hard to design a 10kg/sec sour gas boiler that uses a single aquatuner with supercoolant (so ~1.2m DTU/sec heat and cold, BOTH of which go into the system.) The volcano at the usual 1kg/sec long-term output is well over a million DTU/s so that has you covered but the AETN is only 80kDTU/sec cooling. Comparing that to the supercoolant setup, it's 6.66% of it, so you could get 666g/sec natgas out of it. Which, early on, is a metric crapton of power.

The thing is though, for the 10kg/sec boiler to work as efficiently as it does, you do need space materials. Without thermium pumps you're left to moving the gases around mechanically - and I've seen an absolute genius design from @Yalp that does just that, the efficiency can't be there.

Edit: this is @Yalp's thing, maybe he can share something about numbers?

 

[Yalp]

14 minutes ago, biopon said:

Edit: this is @Yalp's thing, maybe he can share something about numbers?

Oh boy, I'm not too certain about numbers, we discussed this in February iirc .

Pretty sure the sour gas hits the cooling pipes at a delta of about 5 K.
The pipes are cooled by 2 sets of 5 TR (Thermo Regulators) running h2.
Input is controlled by gas pressure. Too much gas causes hiccups, the Regulators will struggle, ATs are rather resilient.
The top atmo sensor was set to max. The measuring is more dependent on sensor location because we can't set them higher than 20kg... (less for priming the system!).
Throughput?  More than enough, but hard to determine.( I built one stupide version with 2 AT + SC running about 20-30 kg/s - yes, 2-3 full pipes).

I really should do (or should have done...) a proper write up on this. I did a few modifications, especially on the oil boiling part.

[calibayzone]

1 hour ago, biopon said:

and I've seen an absolute genius design from @Yalp that does just that, the efficiency can't be there.

Yes we do want to see numbers, and how it compares to the most efficient designs with space materials. Also, a sulfur boiler to space may be a turbine-free way of removing the net heat this would generate. 

I have always been a fan of steel pump in magma and <1kg/s pipe "exploit" (don't we all have to choose our exploits?). It's possible to set up a pair of liquid reservoirs and pipe element sensor so that dupes only are allowed to come and repair the pump when the magma supply gets low. The steel maintenance cost for such a setup is very low, only 40kg for at least 5T of magma which in turn transforms way more material.

[biopon]

4 minutes ago, calibayzone said:

so that dupes only are allowed to come and repair the pump

We're getting a bit offtopic but why would the pump break? You can have it like this: 

Drip 50g/sec oil onto the tile under the pump, which will cool it sufficiently if you run the oil pipe through the puddle and make that section conductive. Then just use a filter to separate out the magma from the oil that's also getting sucked in. 

 

 

[calibayzone]

30 minutes ago, calibayzone said:

(don't we all have to choose our exploits?)

This. 

That being said the magic pump reach is far more crucial in designs that smelt insulation into tungsten, where the pump would immediately melt. For pumping magma both strategies are comparable. The oil recycle strategy makes it harder to move the pump when the magma drops because you also need a way to cool the insulated tile [unless you have space materials] (glitch with liquid on hot tile). However, you need to move the pump only occasionally and only for non-volcanic magma. The "repair on need" strategy only lets dupes repair once your magma supply gets low, so it's low-cost. And it saves you "exploit-karma". This lets you use the saved karma for other exploits such as infinite fluid storage. So both methods have their distinct advantages.

[Foefaller]

6 hours ago, Yalp said:

Just a few (rough) numbers done with https://oni-assistant.com/tools/coolingcalculator reveal how much throughput you get for a specific temperature delta the AETN has to accomplish.

  Reveal hidden contents

The  start -> target temps are only relevant for the delta, no need to bother with entering the condensation temperature here.

If your AETN has to cool the sour gas by 40°C you should be able to convert about 1 kg/s.

Double the delta (80°C) and you can still do 0.5 kg/s.

If you wanted to convert an entire oil well's output (3.333 kg/s) you'd need to reduce the delta to 12-13 °C.

So a lot of it depends on your pre-cooling.

 

You are right about what most people would consider "normal", but you can definitely build a SG-boiler without space mats. 

You'd have to rely on something like a Volcano or a Metal Refinery for heat.

Cooling would be done with Thermo Regulators and h2. It's way less efficient, yes, but considering the amount of power you get out of it, it's still viable.

Well, this leaky oil fissure releases oil only at 308g/s, which, if I understand the math right, the AETN could probably cool it fast enough as long as the gas is within it's normal operating range when it arrives.

...Though only having that much oil means that at best I'm only get as much out of it as I would a regular nat. gas geyser, even if the only powered parts are the thermo regulators and a couple of pumps (oil fissures release oil for 100% of their active period, but from what I can tell still go dormant at times) but again, this is more for learning the *how* in amounts that are easy to control than actually using it for practical purposes.

Actually, the hard part might be fitting enough cooling below the AETN to get it that cold on the way up. I figure I could just let the oil flow down there on it's own, with a 1 or 2 tile drop to where the heat exchanger would be so it can double as a liquid lock to keep the sour gas in. But I might need to hold the gas in the initial cooling part for a while before it can reach the nullifier rather than have a nice "it will be cold enough when it gets there" maze for it.

[AMBLCO]

On 2019-09-22 at 9:55 AM, Yalp said:

I built one stupide version with 2 AT + SC running about 20-30 kg/s - yes, 2-3 full pipes

I would really like to see that one it sounds interesting.