Power positive ethanol?

[Rawk Hawk]

I've been trying to do some math on using ethanol distillers to run a petroleum generator, but I feel like I'm missing something.  Running a petroleum generator constantly requires 4 distillers, and the distillers and generator themselves require just shy of 4 carbon skimmers running constantly which in turn, require a water sieve.  The problem is that all of that eats up around 1500 watts of power, which means 3/4 of the output of your generator is gone, and we haven't even begun cooling the 27000 ish DTU/s that all these machines output!  Never mind dealing with the polluted dirt and water, pumps and auto sweepers are only going to push any setup I can think of further into the red.  Is there a way to run an ethanol setup that is power positive?

[Soulwind]

One, I put both the distillers and the generator in a sealed room and just let the co2 build up.  Currently about 100kg per tile right now.

Eventually I might feed it to slicksters or vent to space.

Two, I use the polluted water to feed an arbor tree farm.

Three, cooling is a side effect of my base cooler that I use anyway.  It's hot in there but under damage levels.

It's power positive.  Not by a huge amount but enough to run the base, minus the other industrials.

You could also use tune ups on the generator.  That turns it into 3mw.

[psusi]

It only takes 18 watts to pump the polluted water.  I haven't looked at what a shipping rail system takes to move the pdirt but dupes can move it just fine for zero power.  Without a shipping rail, yea, you spend 1538 out of the 2000 watts so you're still in the black on power.  You also gain quite a bit of water and either oxygen, sand, or coal depending on what you do with the polluted dirt.  You can gain more by using engie's tune up on the generator and/or ranching slicksters instead of using the carbon skimmer ( and that also gets you more water ).

[Trego]

There are a ton of ways to handle the problem, obviously, but I'll outline perhaps the simplest one here, although it's not that much different than what soulwind said above.   Vent the co2 to space, saving you the 4 carbon skimmers, while letting the co2 take away much of the heat generated as well for passive heat removal.  Heat up the lumber in some useful way to  passively remove even more heat, which is destroyed as you put hot lumber into the distillers.  Heat up the polluted water coming out of the petroleum generator on its way to your arbor tree farm (If you're growing them domestically) for even more passive heat removal.  Using manual labor to put the pdirt into compost bins is the cheapest way to handle that, power wise, although there are other methods of course.

[avc15]

7 hours ago, Rawk Hawk said:

auto sweepers are only going to push any setup I can think of further into the red

First to address this. One rail can supply four distillers. One rail at full utilization takes 360 watts, and your four distillers won't bring a rail to full utilization. It's not as severe as it seems when you look at all those sweepers moving around on your screen. I suspect if you benchmarked it, the rail would account for somewhere near 80w. (edit: I was remembering numbers from an old build that had 12 distillers, it's not 280W, it's closer to 80W)

Psusi has it, the key with ethanol power is tune-up. Give it a dedicated engineer so that it's always tuned up.

Last - think of all that power you're saving on base cooling, with that wild tree farm. Wild tree farms consume a substantial amount of heat. (irrigated tree farms are okay too, but the irrigation can bring in external heat)

 

[Rawk Hawk]

With regard to venting CO2 to space or feeding it to slicksters, replacing the carbon skimmers and sieve with pumps saves a grand total of 2.6 watts, and while you could use the oil from slicksters to generate power, you would have to ranch 35 of them to deal with the massive amount of CO2 you are generating, and while this might be practical in the lategame, you have much better sources of power by then, especially given the number of dupes you would have to dedicate to ranching nonstop here.  Actually, doing the math on it, without a petroleum boiler or molten slicksters, the slicksters would produce a measly 263 watts or 583 watts with molten/boiler.  Barely enough to break even with the gas pumps.

My original idea for looking into this was using a setup like this in the midgame to provide some power, while using the new sublimation stations to offgass the poluted dirt and run a puft ranch.  Then I could run slime distillers off of the ranch to recover enough polluted water to make the system water positive even with domestic arbor trees, but the more I look into it, it just doesn't seem viable.  It would produce 280kg of pwater and 167 kg of algae per cycle, but if its going to require a petroleum boiler or metal volcano tamer just to get power out of it then there are much easier power sources available in the midgame.

So far it seems like the best way to run something like this would be to build it next to the space biome and have a mechanized airlock vent the CO2 to space as needed, but if you are capable of building in the space biome, you have better options available.

[Trego]

Yes, venting to space implies building it next to the space biome and letting the co2 diffuse out to space without pumping (which is why the word venting was used instead of pumping, although ironically the word 'vent' does originally come from the latin 'exventare', which means 'to stir or move by forcefully fanning').  Building just below the space biome is not difficult, even in the early game.  If completing the vent is an issue in the early game, one can just wait 100 cycles letting the co2 build up before completing the vent.  This is kind of a weird conversation, it started being about whether it was possible to run ethanol in a power positive way, and it's sliding into some other conversation where you're just kinda explaining why you're not going to use it?  Hey man we're not the ATF taxing your ethanol by the litre, if you don't like it don't use it, or just let Meep drink it all.

[Soulwind]

11 hours ago, Rawk Hawk said:

With regard to venting CO2 to space or feeding it to slicksters, replacing the carbon skimmers and sieve with pumps saves a grand total of 2.6 watts, and while you could use the oil from slicksters to generate power, you would have to ranch 35 of them to deal with the massive amount of CO2 you are generating, and while this might be practical in the lategame, you have much better sources of power by then, especially given the number of dupes you would have to dedicate to ranching nonstop here.  Actually, doing the math on it, without a petroleum boiler or molten slicksters, the slicksters would produce a measly 263 watts or 583 watts with molten/boiler.  Barely enough to break even with the gas pumps.
 

When I'm feeding to slicksters, I don't use pumps.  As I said, I have a sealed room with hundreds of KG of (rather warm) CO2.

What I do is I put in a mech door between that room and the slickster ranch room.  I also run a loop of hot coolant from my metal forge through some metal tiles in the slickster room, just to provide the extra heat to keep them alive.  The slickster room is fully insulated.

Then I just, either manually or with a gas sensor, open and close the mech door to replenish the CO2 in the slickster room as it is used up.

Do I stay ahead of the CO2 production?  Not even close, but I don't really care as it doesn't prevent the gens/distilleries from operating.

[sheaker]

Hello.
I think I had this system working and self sustainable (with cooling and gas management).

You can download my save file with this setup under this post:

Setup is located at the top - above Gravity Hall.

 

Hope it helps.

[TheMule]

21 hours ago, Rawk Hawk said:

Is there a way to run an ethanol setup that is power positive?

What you describe is power positive, just not by much. I see the ethanol loop more as pdirt production with energy as byproduct than the other way around. You can feed pdirt to sage hatches for food and coal (= more power), or to pokeshells for lime and sand.

It's also a good way to store energy. Run the distillers when solar panel production peaks, burn ethanol on demand. It's much more effective than battery banks, which are limited in capacity. With infinite storage, there no upper limit on stored energy with ethanol. The fact that it's power positive only adds to its usefulness in that application.

You can put the generator in a power sauna and gain a bit more energy from high temp pwater (steam) via steam turbines.

[ZanthraSW]

With steel and plastic you can deal with heat from the petroleum generator and get extra power by keeping it near overheat temp in a steam turbine room like this:

Extra Power from Heated Petroleum Generator and Steam Turbine - [Oxygen Not Included] - General Discussion - Klei Entertainment Forums

I have used it to make ethanol power solutions much more efficient.

[cpy]

Yep building below space is good or you can build REALLY REALLY LOOOOOOONG boy chimney. Your call. This would save you a lot of power.

[psusi]

On 12/13/2020 at 11:03 PM, Rawk Hawk said:

Actually, doing the math on it, without a petroleum boiler or molten slicksters, the slicksters would produce a measly 263 watts or 583 watts with molten/boiler.  Barely enough to break even with the gas pumps.

Yes, you want to use molten slicksters, and you also don't use gas pumps.  You just ranch them in the room with the generator and distillers.  So +583 watts from burning the petrol in a generator ( plus the additional water and CO2 ), vs -466 watts running carbon skimmers.  That's basically an extra kw of power plus all the meat and water.