Petro-well 4000™

[myxal]

I found myself wanting to scale down my petroleum production (*cough CLRR), and stumbled upon the tidbit in the compendium according to which you can make the oil well produce petroleum if the supplied water is of sufficient temperature... and the superheated crude is able to flash to petroleum before cooling down.

Fast forward a modest sandbox session - presenting the Petro-well 4000:

• Takes 95˚C water
• Produces ~100˚C petroleum and natural gas
• Self Passively-cooled turbine
• Can be automated by demand
• Perfect gas filtration (fault-tolerant), steam recycling, no "undesired" outputs
• Zero pipe breakage

Blueprint: https://blueprintnotincluded.org/b/68ee42878277168774f4b184

Model 4000 is discontinued as of game version U58. See our updated 5000 model and the U58 service bulletin below for your modern petroleum-boiling needs.

(clip of latest version below)

Spoiler

 

At full capacity, AT with supercoolant runs 15-20%. This could probably be brought much lower with a better heat exchanger, and more importantly, not leaking heat in the tick when superheated crude lands from the well and pushes the hot petrol onto the well and into contact with visco-gel. Oh well...

Startup sequence

1. Set up mechanical filter with nat-gas.
2. Drop a blob of petroleum isolating the nat-gas chamber from the heat exchanger
3. Release a bit of nat-gas in the nat gas chamber
4. Disable both pumps
5. Install a temporary brick on the right of the top shelf, spill a bit of petroleum there, and build a bridge connecting the puddle to the metal tile.
6. Split the lowest shelf by a brick, bring in any liquid, and install a temporary tepidizer until the hot block is at ~450C. Lower the temperature setting to 408-415 ASAP - you don't want to remove heat while the lowest shelf's thermal mass is heated up to 100°C/
7. Remove tepidizer, temporary liquid and both temporary bricks. (If it was petroleum, lower its mass to make reaching equilibrium quicker)
8. When the lowest shelf petroleum's temperature goes over 105°C (so no steam can possibly condense), enable the liquid pump. If there's aready steam in the nat-gas chamber, I'd suggest waiting to enable the gas pump until the temp climbs further to avoid pipe breakage.

Edited April 4 by myxal
Expanded startup procedure

[myxal]

 

Revision B - changes:

• use liquid for the ~400°C hot block, doesn't heat up the insulated tiles nearly as quickly vs. steam.
• remove unnecessary tiles
• implement alerting for some failure indicators (Hot block temp drop, wrong element in heat exchanger)
• heavi-watt in connection through vacuum for connecting directly to power spine

 

Removed airflow tile and shuffled remaining buildings in this square. Now the water rejected by the well building is vented directly into the steam chamber (AFAIK this does NOT remove the need for gas pipe filtering, water can still boil off inside the well). This spikes ST's heat output to the point the original design would let ST reach 100°C and get temporarily stifled until enough water heading to the well passed by. This would let 140-180°C petroleum through. To alleviate this, thermal masses above and below the ST floor were increased:

• Top shelf in the steam room has gained granite drywall + insulated gas pipes, and aluminium heavi-watt conductive wire.
• ST has 600kg (total; 120 kg/cell) of water and 3 aluminium TSPs as its thermal buffer.
• The turbine itself is made of aluminium.

EDIT - Actually here's a better idea: make one or more of the pipe segments beyond the oil well's input port radiant. That will dump quite a bit of heat from the waterinto the just-released natural gas, which will be extracted and cooled to 100C anyway, but won't spike the turbine so badly.

Spoiler

• Heat exchanger extended into bottom shelf

Edited October 17, 2025 by myxal

[myxal]

Sneak peek at 4500 prototype:

Spoiler

 

[myxal]

Introducing the 5000 model, our high-efficiency petroleum well. Now self-powering*!

Spoiler

Blueprint: Petroleum well 5000 U58.blueprint(BNI link)

Self-powered operation depends on timely tending by competent duplicants!

The efficiency killer is super-heated water bypassing the oil well and being dumped into the steam room. You may tweak the automation to disable water input by a duplicant motion sensor mounted next to the oil well.

EDIT: Fixed a few oopsies. (include liquid pipe overlay, fix gas pipe mechanical filter)

Highlighting a couple of details:

• superheated water that bypassed the oil well is shedding some heat into the released nat-gas, dropping from 410 to ~360C
  Spoiler

  

• petroleum pool now has a TSP in it, with its corner poking into the steam room, right on the overheated water vent. This basically eliminates turbine heat spikes, as superheated water's heat gets soaked up by all this thermal mass. Temporarily, the steam room is essentially heating up the petroleum.
  Spoiler

  

• AT loop soaks heat from just 2 pipe segments. I wanted to avoid having it contain packets at wildly different temperatures, so I made the wall-embedded part of the loop out of granite insulated pipes. In testing, the supercoolant blobs were ending up at 50-90C in this segment.
  Spoiler

  

• Not done in the presented build, but it might be worth it to use insulite pipes for the superheated water line between the hot block and the oil well, at least where the pipes aren't in vacuum.
  Spoiler

  

• I only learned on this project that oil wells have 4x4 heat exchange footprint, kinda like the steam turbine has 5x4. Put an extra layer of brick on the ceiling to avoid leaking heat from the nat-gas room.
  Spoiler

   

   

 

 

 

 

Edited April 4 by myxal
U58 changes

[Ceos]

This is awesome I love the improvements and details. Thanks for the initial buils and all the changes! 

[myxal]

I've tracked down the trigger for steam release, not sure how to fix it (yet). Might be a game bug?

While a dupe is depressurising the well, it stops producing oil. Only nat-gas is released into the atmosphere. However, water is accepted into the well, and even superheated, stays in the well without boiling off. This continues until the well's 10kg buffer is filled up, then the piped water continues on past the well.

When the dupe's done working on the well, the well continues producing oil. As long as the 1 kg/s flow remains uninterrupted, the well continues producing oil with 9/10 kg of stored superheated water. If the flow is stopped/interrupted, the well uses up its stored water as normal.

The issue happens if the well is operating during save. Upon reload, any stored water will immediately boil into the atmosphere.  If there was flow in the pipe, any incoming water will also be (continuously) released into atmosphere - the well is glitched.

Separate from this, the well may display the stuttering animation - the well shakes, but the horse head isn't moving all the way, and counterweight isn't spinning. I've seen the well do the stuttering animation while it was producing oil normally (judging by droplets of petroleum pouring over the edge), but it's also displaying it when the well is glitched.

I'm not sure how to reliably un-glitch the well. Sometimes interrupting the water flow helps, sometimes it doesn't, sometime it only helps temporarily. Sometimes the well un-glitches itself without having the flow interrupted.

For now the sure-fire way to prevent this is to interrupt oil production during a save. In my save where I use petroleum sparingly, I probably won't bother. For now.

Edited October 20, 2025 by myxal

[Saturnus]

On 10/20/2025 at 1:07 PM, myxal said:

While a dupe is depressurising the well, it stops producing oil. Only nat-gas is released into the atmosphere. However, water is accepted into the well, and even superheated, stays in the well without boiling off. This continues until the well's 10kg buffer is filled up, then the piped water continues on past the well.

It's a feature if it's still in the game. I seem to recall making a bug report about last time I made a petrol well setup some 4 years ago.

Good old times. Maybe I should revisit making a build because I can easily spot a few things that can be improved. Not least because conveyor meters are a thing now.

Should mention this is a no space materials build so things seem sub-optimal but are required because there's no thermium, supercoolant and such.

Edited October 25, 2025 by Saturnus

[myxal]

Revision C of model 4000:

• Update superheated water overflow setup to arrangement from model 5000. This knocks down AT usage during continuous operation down to 13%.
• On-demand use installation in survival revealed that heat from natural gas and the lowest petroleum shelf gradually heats up the insulated tile in contact with turbine's cooling pool and the visco gel barrier, which over long enough periods of inactivity, may cause a flaking incident. Replaced with insulite tile.

Edited October 30, 2025 by myxal

[Saturnus]

Instead of the old shut-off/valve combo for the overflow, you can use a meter valve as it combines the functions of both.

[myxal]

Rest in peace, Petro-well 4000. Your crude-oil-boiling hijinks are too much for the brave new world of U58.

Spoiler

Petro-well service bulletin for U58

The latest game update appears to put computations of heat exchange ahead of phase-change, and droplets of 409C superheated crude oil now have to land into a >403˚C environment to reliably phase-change.

1. Model 4000 is hereby deprecated.
   This build drops its crude next to a significant amount of petrol which is cooled by the incoming water, and a distance away from the heating block. We consider the cost of any satisfactory fix to outweigh the cost of upgrading to an updated model 5000 and we encourage our users to do so. An updated model 5000 is fully supported on game version U58.
2. Model 5000 mandatory maintenance.
   In this model, isolating the landing zone so it remains >403˚C is fairly straightforward - remove the liquid pipes carrying superheated water from the uppermost level of the heat exchanger, shortening the heat exchanger:
   

The changes are reflected in blueprint linked above.

Edited April 4 by myxal