Super heat cracking or something like that?

[pond_grass]

What do you think of as a concept if "cracking" gas was possible at extreme high temperature. I am thinking as part of gas to gas state transition. I am thinking it will be interesting for like making some kind of combustible gas from ethanol gas. As expanding on arbor tree production line,equal to sour gas boiling.

[Simonova]

I've never heard of cracking ethanol; I googled it a bit to see if anyone actually has tried forming natural gas from ethanol (which makes sense to some degree, because burning ethanol as fuel tends to form aldehydes, which aren't super great to be breathing), but found nothing; the only information I could find on ethanol cracking was using it as a way to coke steel (which is interesting in it's own right).

It would be interesting to have an expanded role for ethanol beyond poor man's petroleum and nosh sprouts (which I find to be dubious as a food source just from the overall water requirements for tofu); at very least, some way to use it in a rocket engine.

Then I read a bit more about 60 seconds after I wrote this, and saw a paper on how ethanol is being used to make regular hydrocarbon fuel cracking more efficient by inhibiting the formation of pure carbon deposits; maybe a machine that takes in petroleum and ethanol gas to output natural gas?

[pond_grass]

4 minutes ago, Simonova said:

It would be interesting to have an expanded role for ethanol beyond poor man's petroleum and nosh sprouts (which I find to be dubious as a food source just from the overall water requirements for tofu); at very least, some way to use it in a rocket engine.

Nosh sprouts (tofu) is actually better than sleet wheat in water terms, about 340kcal per cycle with 14kg of water(total including 2 arbor trees) per cycle (per sprout).
 

[Simonova]

Yeah, sleet wheat doesn't thrill me either; I've found myself favoring food sources that aren't water bound, as I've discovered that water budget starts being very constraining.

Grubfruit and sweetle farms are amazing, though a good chunk of that is due to sulfur having extremely limited uses beyond that, while water enters into nearly every other process somehow.

[pond_grass]

2 hours ago, Simonova said:

Yeah, sleet wheat doesn't thrill me either; I've found myself favoring food sources that aren't water bound, as I've discovered that water budget starts being very constraining.

Grubfruit and sweetle farms are amazing, though a good chunk of that is due to sulfur having extremely limited uses beyond that, while water enters into nearly every other process somehow.

It's possible to use polluted dirt(200kg/cycle) to produce oxygen, for about 132 kg/cycle  of polluted oxygen or 119 kg/cycle of oxygen which could support about 2 duplicants (though you will need some additional source, for the extra 1kg/cycle).

[Sasza22]

On 5/1/2022 at 6:45 AM, pond_grass said:

What do you think of as a concept if "cracking" gas was possible at extreme high temperature. I am thinking as part of gas to gas state transition. I am thinking it will be interesting for like making some kind of combustible gas from ethanol gas. As expanding on arbor tree production line,equal to sour gas boiling.

Well cracking iirc is a term for hydrocarbons, especially long chains that "crack" under high temperature or by other means like some chanicals. Ethanol is a really small compound so it isn`t really suscepitble to cracking, more likely to be a product of craking something bigger. That said i`m not an expert in petrochemics so maybe there is some reaction possible under high temperature.

More likely though to happen in some sort of bioreactor where microorganisms might just break ethanol into methane.

[tuxii]

Hydrocarbon cracking could already be considered to be in the game, in my opinion.  It does not at all resemble how it is done in the real world, but boiling crude oil or plastic into sour gas could be considered ONI's version of cracking.  The real world requires a complicated high pressure cracking process itself followed by multiple fractionation towers and further processing to create multiple usable products from the cracking process whereas in ONI we just have to freeze the Sour Gas (which is a lethal mostly unwanted byproduct in the real world) to -165C to get pure useable Natural Gas.