Why ethanol is not a rocket fuel?

[sheaker]

Dear All,

I am very disappointed that ethanol can not be used as rocket fuel, or am I wrong? Was it intentional? It is hard to believe for me since description of ethanol says it is advanced fuel and petroleum generator is working on both - petroleum or ethanol. This makes me feel I can power a rocket petroleum engine with it as well. Now I am left with heat, infrastructure and 250 000 kg of useless ethanol (sustainable achievement). I barely can believe the description is so inaccurate.

 

 

[Yoma_Nosme]

  is, was, probably will be. But now you know...that's always worth at least something 

Just build an infinity tank and flush it all in...at least it will be out of the way. 

 

[Junksteel]

This was also the reason I gave up on my 128x128 map with no oil biome. When I realized I'd have to go straight to liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen without supercoolant I stopped playing. Like you, I assumed Ethanol could fuel my rockets.

This isn't a gamebreaking thing but would make a lot of sense to have rockets fueled by Ethanol. I think we need more reasons to produce it and justify the ludicrous amount of waste it generates compared to Petroleum (which can even make Plastic).

[DarkMaster13]

I usually think of ethanol as a way to store power, rather than to generate it.  Assuming you aren't using infinite storage glitches, liquids are far easier to store large amounts of than gasses.  So If you aren't consuming hydrogen or natural gas as fast as it's being produced, you can use the extra to refine ethanol for electric use later.  Unlike batteries, ethanol doesn't lose energy or produce waste while it's just sitting there.  You can also get a lot of extra power if you're doing generator tune-ups using this method, since you get to double the 50% energy boost.  That's also really good if energy/fuel is tight.

If you've got an abundance of fuel, a large bank of renewables, and/or an energy lean base, then there's really no reason to be refining ethanol for power.

[Junksteel]

8 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Unlike batteries, ethanol doesn't lose energy or produce waste while it's just sitting there.

Can you explain this more deeply?  Pardon my ignorance but why are you comparing ethanol to batteries and not to Petroleum? My experience producing ethanol is a lot of waste.14 Composters and 4 carbon skimmers didn't keep up with the production for a single nonstop generator..

[speckle21]

Klei should take a page out of real life: Ethanol can be catalytically converted into petroleum and water. In fact a simpler process called "methanol to gasoline" is done on a large scale in countries that have don't have oil and can't afford to buy it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids#Methanol_to_gasoline_(MTG)_and_methanol_to_olefins

 

Maybe a machine that makes petroleum and water from ethanol. 

[suicide commando]

25 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

Can you explain this more deeply?  Pardon my ignorance but why are you comparing ethanol to batteries and not to Petroleum? My experience producing ethanol is a lot of waste.14 Composters and 4 carbon skimmers didn't keep up with the production for a single nonstop generator..

The idea behind that is, to use Ethanol as fuel for petrol generators and to use ethanol distillers as a means to turn power + lumber into ethanol, which gets stored until it's needed for power production.

 

[DarkMaster13]

30 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

Can you explain this more deeply?  Pardon my ignorance but why are you comparing ethanol to batteries and not to Petroleum? My experience producing ethanol is a lot of waste.14 Composters and 4 carbon skimmers didn't keep up with the production for a single nonstop generator..

Suicide commando's right.  The principle is to have them replace battery banks and physically storing gasses.  A gas tank can hold 150 kg in 15 tiles (10 kg/tile).  In free space, you can store 20 kg/tile with a high pressure vent (with the additional the cost of needing power to recover it).  Liquids can be stored in liquid tanks that hold 5000 kg in 6 tiles, or 833.3... kg/tile, or ethanol can be stored loose in tiles at 1000 kg/tile (with the additional cost of needing power to recover it).  Roughly speaking, you can store 42 to 100 times as much liquid ethanol in the same space as you can store gases.

A hydrogen generator produces 800 Watts and consumes 0.1 kg of hydrogen per second.  A petroleum generator produces 2000 Watts and consumes 2 kg of ethanol or petroleum per second.  8000 W/kg/s vs 1000 W/kg/s, that's only 8 times as efficient compared to the massive 42 times minimum in terms of storage space.  So if you can convert hydrogen into petroleum at a 1 to 1 conversion in terms of power usage, you're getting a huge improvement on storage.  This isn't even factoring in if you're converting the generated dirt into coal with sage hatches or the CO2 into oil/petroleum with slicksters.

What are the alternatives for storing power?  Batteries, but they lose power over time and generate heat.  You can produce heat and boil water, but this leaves you having to store steam which is less energy dense than ethanol.and will be running at a loss if you aren't using a supercoolant aquatuner to power the boiler and power tuning the steam turbines.  That means mandatory dupe labor.  Same thing if we go with oil wells.

I suppose for practical reasons you'll want to use dupe labor to harvest the arbor trees, but everything else in ethanol can be fully automated to function as excess power trap that then feeds into backup petroleum generators when power, or as the primary power source for your base and have the ethanol on a seperate grid that's powered by intermittent sources like geysers and sunlight.

[Junksteel]

Well, thanks on the detailed explanation but I really don't understand the point of it not being a rocket fuel. I appreciate your effort on making all the conversions pretty clear but I still fail to understand why it being more storage friendly undermines its potential as rocket fuel in the state it is when leaving ethanol distillers.

[Meltdown]

What if the idea of substituting petroleum with ethanol just happened to be forgotten during development? Or just was left out of release build due to some kind of deadline and later sunk under other tasks with higher priority?

My other hypothesis is that is done intentionally to create the need to explore oil biome and setup infrastructure to obtain petroleum.

[DarkMaster13]

1 hour ago, Junksteel said:

Well, thanks on the detailed explanation but I really don't understand the point of it not being a rocket fuel. I appreciate your effort on making all the conversions pretty clear but I still fail to understand why it being more storage friendly undermines its potential as rocket fuel in the state it is when leaving ethanol distillers.

I agree that it should be useable as a rocket fuel in some way.  The point I was trying to make was that there are reasons to make it even without that as an option.

[TheDeamon]

3 hours ago, speckle21 said:

Klei should take a page out of real life: Ethanol can be catalytically converted into petroleum and water. In fact a simpler process called "methanol to gasoline" is done on a large scale in countries that have don't have oil and can't afford to buy it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids#Methanol_to_gasoline_(MTG)_and_methanol_to_olefins

 

Maybe a machine that makes petroleum and water from ethanol. 

The problem you hit if you want to bring the real world into the mix is that the energy density of Ethanol is lower than Gasoline. So if you want to compare petrol to gasoline, then by all rights the Petroleum Generator either needs to have its power output reduce when running on Ethanol, or it needs to require more ethanol/sec for equivalent power production.

This is why Flex Fuel vehicles see their gas mileage drop per gallon when they increase the amount of ethanol in the tank.

[speckle21]

59 minutes ago, TheDeamon said:

The problem you hit if you want to bring the real world into the mix is that the energy density of Ethanol is lower than Gasoline. So if you want to compare petrol to gasoline, then by all rights the Petroleum Generator either needs to have its power output reduce when running on Ethanol, or it needs to require more ethanol/sec for equivalent power production.
 

Why is that a problem? The game already violates thermodynamics by making ethanol and petroleum equal in terms of energy density. 

There is no requirement for the game to match life. Nor does taking real life as an inspiration require us to also take the downsides. I don't think the physics police are going to bust Klei "Hey! you can't make a game where you can produce ethanol from petroleum and NOT have them have inefficiencies! $400000 fine!"

The game is already broken thermodynamically, nit-picking that ethanol should have lower energy density than petroleum is... well... nit-picking.

But i think the idea of an ethanol-petroleum converter may be useful. Because a few other things in the game use petroleum and if you don't have oil you're REALLY screwed until you can get or bio-print slicksters from the bio-printer.

I think the "problem" is not whether real life allows it. Because it's a game, it doesn't matter, we can define what's allowed and what's not. Instead the problem is more if the game play would still be balanced or not. Is it a fun challenge to have to without petroleum? or a arduous handicap with no real sense of accomplishment if you pull it off?

Personally i'd like a converter, maybe with a handicap like it takes 2kg ethanol to make 1kg petroleum. Maybe even more fun is if the game physics is adjusted so there is no machine, but you have to make it using physics tricks like sour gas. Like heat ethanol up to 300C and then it becomes petroleum (or even oil) and steam. Loads of fun to figure out how to make such a machine. 

 

Let's go for FUN and take real life as inspiration.

 

 

[nakomaru]

On 3/5/2020 at 6:10 AM, Meltdown said:

that is done intentionally to create the need to explore oil biome and setup infrastructure to obtain petroleum

This is the most likely explanation for me. It is better gameplay if it doesn't completely replace petrol.

You can play half width maps with no real balance issues, but when you shrink the height too a lot of stuff gets cut out.

[TheDeamon]

On 3/4/2020 at 4:42 PM, speckle21 said:

But i think the idea of an ethanol-petroleum converter may be useful. Because a few other things in the game use petroleum and if you don't have oil you're REALLY screwed until you can get or bio-print slicksters from the bio-printer.

I would be fine with this particular change proposal, but it is still a step removed from the initial proposal of using Ethanol as Rocket Fuel. Yes, it ultimately did fuel a rocket, but not as ethanol.