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Any advice for a Sour Gas boiler without Thermium?


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Hello everyone, 

I want to make a Sour Gas boiler on oasisse to exploit the many sources of oil I have; the catch is that I don't have access yet to Thermium thus cannot have an AT as my heat source for boiling off the Petroleum.

My current plan is to use a metal refinery with Petroleum as coolant in order to melt 800kg of Lead and use that Molten Lead as coolant in a refinery that would run when the coolant is lower than ~600°C, flashing the Petroleum into Sour Gas.

Does anyone have good advice on things to avoid or even a blueprint of their experiments?

I want to note that I don't really want to use Magma as my heat source as I find it hard to manage with Steel, maybe I should get better at handling it.

Will I be better off using Molten Glass (already in pipes, so quite useful) or any other coolant?

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On 17/10/2019 at 4:36 PM, DonDegow said:

Hello everyone, 

I want to make a Sour Gas boiler on oasisse to exploit the many sources of oil I have; the catch is that I don't have access yet to Thermium thus cannot have an AT as my heat source for boiling off the Petroleum.

My current plan is to use a metal refinery with Petroleum as coolant in order to melt 800kg of Lead and use that Molten Lead as coolant in a refinery that would run when the coolant is lower than ~600°C, flashing the Petroleum into Sour Gas.

Does anyone have good advice on things to avoid or even a blueprint of their experiments?

I want to note that I don't really want to use Magma as my heat source as I find it hard to manage with Steel, maybe I should get better at handling it.

Will I be better off using Molten Glass (already in pipes, so quite useful) or any other coolant?

The thing is cooling down the sour gas to methane (as I guess your goal is to get NG from crude oil, considering the fact that sour gas is useless by itself). Then it's doable using thermo-regulator and hydrogen, but will not be power efficient I guess. You'll spend a lot more power for the refinery and for thermo-regulators than the power you'll get from the NG generators supplied.

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@OxCD Cooling down the sour gas is really the easy part without Thermium, my build would still include an AT for this sole purpose. However you might be right that it doesn't end up being power positive when heated through a refinery.

@Yoma_Nosme I found only one volcano and it's already attached to a steam turbine, I'd prefer a build around an oil fissure rather than a build around a volcano.

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Just now, DonDegow said:

@OxCD Cooling down the sour gas is really the easy part without Thermium, my build would still include an AT for this sole purpose.

@Yoma_Nosme I found only one volcano and it's already attached to a steam turbine, I'd prefer a build around an oil fissure rather than a build around a volcano.

Oh...ok,..well, I would still go for the volcano, steam turbine would cool the at in my vision but...

If you don't like it...skip the steel melting. Just use the magma as coolant in a refinery. Don't forget a reservoir because it evens out the temp of your magma when in a loop...good luck :)

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16 minutes ago, DonDegow said:

@OxCD Cooling down the sour gas is really the easy part without Thermium, my build would still include an AT for this sole purpose. However you might be right that it doesn't end up being power positive when heated through a refinery.

Mmmh so an AT with supercoolant ? So you do have access to space material ? That's not what I get from your original post.

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Ah you're right, I'm so used to being limited by higher temp of AT itself I totally forgot the lower limit of the coolant. I guess I could use gaseous H2 in thermoregulator to make the first packets of methane or even LOX that I'll then use as coolant in AT

Otherwise it's possible to not have an easy access to tungsten on oasisse depending on planets seed so still useful with supercoolant and no thermium.

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7 minutes ago, DonDegow said:

Ah you're right, I'm so used to being limited by higher temp of AT itself I totally forgot the lower limit of the coolant. I guess I could use gaseous H2 in thermoregulator to make the first packets of methane or even LOX that I'll then use as coolant in AT

Otherwise it's possible to not have an easy access to tungsten on oasisse depending on planets seed so still useful with supercoolant and no thermium.

Yes, your only two options I can see for cooling with liquids is liquid Hydrogen or Oxygen, and those need to be colder than you need them just to become liquid.

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I put this together in sandbox, I'm about to build it in survival - can post details if there's interest. It also uses the 1kg/sec mechanic that the Neotuck build takes advantage of, but I get no external cooling whatsoever, and I'm pretty sure I still use less power.

This is a prototype and the final one will be smaller (there's a lot on this picture that's not being used). Even though vertically it'll stay the same.

image.thumb.png.93460a12147530efe88bf493acbd99ca.png

The cooling is done with oil, methane and sulphur counterflow (final 2kg/sec natgas @ around 20 degrees C). More passive cooling with 2 steam turbines, and active cooling with an AT (pwater), and 7 thermo regulators (I built 11 but disabled 4). So all in, less than 3KW power needed to operate. Heating with a couple hundred grams a sec worth of magma-sourced rocks. Most materials are cheap; 95% of the tempshifts are granite, the diamond windows can be subbed with metal if needed. It's heavy on the aluminium though - I *think* most of it can be subbed with gold or iron as the build could do more than 2kg/sec as it is, but I'd have to split the outgoing methane into more pipes then, and I really don't feel like it. 22 natgas gens is probably going to tide me over until thermium.

 

10 minutes ago, Chthonicone said:

Yes, your only two options I can see for cooling with liquids is liquid Hydrogen or Oxygen, and those need to be colder than you need them just to become liquid.

You can cool with thermo regulators, it's more efficient. I thought about running LOX in an AT as main coolant, but the only thing it's better in than a few thermo regulators is the space taken up. With an AT running LOX you get 118 dtu/sec/watt cooling, with a thermo reg running hydrogen you get 140. And it's easier to put together.

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3 hours ago, biopon said:

I put this together in sandbox, I'm about to build it in survival - can post details if there's interest. It also uses the 1kg/sec mechanic that the Neotuck build takes advantage of, but I get no external cooling whatsoever, and I'm pretty sure I still use less power.

very nice

my old build was done before steam turbines were useful, it's good to see my old build upgraded with them

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1 minute ago, Neotuck said:

my old build was done before steam turbines were useful, it's good to see my old build upgraded with them

Glad to see you're still here!

Honestly, I saw your build and I figured your concept was fantastic, why try to be original? :)

I think the only thing I'd mention is that you were not dealing with the sulphur. It's often overlooked (and often rightly so as it gets lost in the noise with thermium/SC ATs) but if you raise them up the tower you can easily get 100kDTU/s cooling from them on a 2 kg/sec build, possibly a lot more, and they don't hinder your pool's temperature either (they spawn at -163C so are an ever-growing nuisance).

Oh, and the tempshift lines spaced 2 apart create temperature zones that greatly help the final result of the heat exchange.

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Does anyone have any pre-space sour gas boiler builds like...an eighth the size?  Everyone's builds are always soo huge and run soo many generators, they're way overkill for my needs.  Problem is they all seem to be hyper tuned to their specific flow rates and such, so it doesn't seem like they can be and scaled down.

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Mine could be scaled down, you can make it narrower and decrease the output but if you mess with the height, the efficiency comes down, meaning more heating and more cooling needed. 

Pre-space you have to get the most out of heat exchange between the gas, the input, and the output, and it takes a lot of room to do that effectively. (It helps to do this with supercoolant too, but it's far easier when you can put the gas into pipes.)

Hm actually you could use steel pumps after the oil stage and pick up the gas, put it into radiant pipes, and make like half of the tower collapse, I'll tinker with that... It'll cost 1.5kW of power for the pumps, but if the whole thing gets a lot smaller, it'll be worth it. Gold amalgam would work too after the top turbines.

 

 

 

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On ‎10‎/‎17‎/‎2019 at 2:44 PM, Gamers Handbook said:

Does anyone have any pre-space sour gas boiler builds like...an eighth the size?  Everyone's builds are always soo huge and run soo many generators, they're way overkill for my needs.  Problem is they all seem to be hyper tuned to their specific flow rates and such, so it doesn't seem like they can be and scaled down.

The more you flow, the more efficient the system is.  And the reason they're huge is usually because you're running a ton of space just for the temperature exchanges you might as well attach a few things along the way.

Even Petro boilers pre-space can get pretty big just on the exchanger alone.

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On 10/17/2019 at 4:44 PM, Gamers Handbook said:

Does anyone have any pre-space sour gas boiler builds like...an eighth the size?  Everyone's builds are always soo huge and run soo many generators, they're way overkill for my needs.  Problem is they all seem to be hyper tuned to their specific flow rates and such, so it doesn't seem like they can be and scaled down.

It’s actually fairly easy to make a small one, but it’s going to be difficult to scale it up. Step one is the boiler proper, which is pretty easy: just put oil near lava. Eventually you get sour gas and igneous rock. Next step is to cool it. Easiest way to do that without messing with super coolant or chains of thermo-regulators is to pump it into the same room as an AETN. Then pump the liquid methane into another room, pass the incoming sour gas through with radiant pipes, and put in a pump to collect the natural gas. The bigger the heat exchanger, the more efficient the system will be, but you can cheat a little bit by just running the pipes right next to each other. Won’t be a great heat exchanger, but it will be one that doubles as a hallway. If you don’t have AETNs (oassise map) or don’t have lava (frozen core and no volcanoes uncovered) then you’re gonna have to find an alternative.

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@WanderingKid I'm not concerned with crazy efficiency, just a bit of it.  Mass volume is pretty low on my list as well.

@StarSquid Hmm, well I'm on Oassis right now.  Cooling to methane without it being extremely slow with more power draw used than made is my biggest hurdle.  I can cook it and get to the freezing point of Pwater (or Oil or Petroleum) fine enough.  It's the step from there to methane that's the most problematic for me.  You bring up a good point with the AETN, but then my hopes were crushed with not any on my map lol.

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On 10/18/2019 at 8:59 PM, WanderingKid said:

 

Even Petro boilers pre-space can get pretty big just on the exchanger alone.

With less than 40 tiles to build a heat exchanger, you can get nearly perfect heat recovery from counter flow heat exchange in a petroleum boiler. The boiler itself can be made using less than 20 tiles even including heat management.

 

@Gamers Handbook it's not the question you asked, but, a petroleum boiler will probably fill your need, be easier to run reliably without intervention, and it's kind of naturally small like you asked.

 

Sour gas condensers want to be big.

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