Natural Gas Geyser Power Questions

[Geschinta]

So in my current seed there is a natural gas geyser directly outside of the temperate biome, and I've never encountered one before. I've encased it in insulated tiles but would like to make use of it as a power source. I tried to find designs and suggestions online but most are from before the cosmic upgrade, which as I understand changed the way things worked and now older designs are not as applicable. Does anyone have/know of designs post-cosmic upgrade, or have suggestions for using a NG geyser in a power setup?

[Soulwind]

Depends on exactly how much you want to do with it.  

You can either:

1) Just dig out a huge area for it to fill with gas, put in a gas pump, and pump it to your generators.

or

2) Build a compressor type automation to super compress the gas into a smaller area, put in a gas pump, and pump it to your generators.

 

Either way, you'll want to hook the generators to a smart battery so they don't try to run non-stop (you'll burn through gas way too fast),

and unless it's just a massive geyser (and you use compressor to keep the area from over-pressure shutoff of the geyser), you'll still need

a backup power source (coal is simplest there) for when the geyser goes dormant.

 

Watch out with completely insulating the geyser area.  That gas is hot and it will eventually overheat your pump if you don't bleed

some of the heat out.  I usually use a non-insulated granite wall on one side to let the heat bleed out of that side (I try to get it into an area that I

want to be hot like for balm lilies and pepper plants).

[Geschinta]

Thanks for the tips, I already have a coal generator going in pair with my hatch farm and excess run-off energy from my SPOM so dormant shouldn't be too much of an issue I'd imagine. What's considered average output for a NG geyser?

[Papartichaud]

Here is what i do with natural gas geysers :

First : Analyze it to know how much nat gas you will get per sec. before you can analyze it, you know two things : 

How much g/s you get, and the eruption period. After you have analyzed the geyser you'll get the active period, and to know how much gas nat you get per sec you have to do these maths :  ...G/s X (...cycles / every ... cycles ) X (Active during ...cycles / per ... cycles ) = ... real nat gas G/s

For example, if i have a nat gas with these stats : 295G/s, eruption period : 158 per 254 cycles, and active period : 87 cycles per 139 cycles, i'll have :

295 X (158/254) X (87/139) = 114.85G/sec wich can make run one gas nat gen + a little bit for another gas nat generator if you need a little more of 800 w/sec (This is the case for all the geysers i've found so far)

 

Now for the setup, here is a little example :

Considering that the gas nat will come at 150° C you will need to cool it otherwise it will break your gas pump, that's why i use 2 wheezewort most of the time around the geyser. I built a little room in abyssalite insulated tiles to avoid heat exchance with the biome, and then the gaz will be sucked by the door compressor system with this automation (same thing to store the co2 you'll get from the generators) :

All the automation are at 2sec except for the filter gate at 10sec to let the gas nat flow in the room

Then you have the smart battery with automation and same thing for the pump with a hydro sensor to pump the polluted water away when it reaches a certain point.

[Craigjw]

The map I'm playing at the moment, I have 2 Nat gas geysers, both of which are chucking out gas at 39°C.  Odd that your NG geysers are running hot, or perhaps it's odd that mine aren't!  Either way, I've been pumping gas for over 300 cycles without incident using just Iron pumps.

I encased each geyser in a 8x10-ish room with a pump at the top, both pumps flow into a larger room using high pressure vents.  NG geysers stop emitting gas at over 5kg pressure, so the larger room acts as storage.  Initially, I put a pump at the top and bottom, to filter out the excess crap.  Once I have 100% NG, I switch off the 2nd pump and bypass the filter.

Of course, the NG generators will run hot, so I place a Weez in between them.

[BlueLance]

9 hours ago, Geschinta said:

So in my current seed there is a natural gas geyser directly outside of the temperate biome, and I've never encountered one before. I've encased it in insulated tiles but would like to make use of it as a power source. I tried to find designs and suggestions online but most are from before the cosmic upgrade, which as I understand changed the way things worked and now older designs are not as applicable. Does anyone have/know of designs post-cosmic upgrade, or have suggestions for using a NG geyser in a power setup?

I use my own build to cool and pump the natural gas to my bases storage systems, How you store it from there is entirely up to you  Eventually it will begin to come out super cool

[Argelle]

9 hours ago, Papartichaud said:

Here is what i do with natural gas geysers :

First : Analyze it to know how much nat gas you will get per sec. before you can analyze it, you know two things : 

How much g/s you get, and the eruption period. After you have analyzed the geyser you'll get the active period, and to know how much gas nat you get per sec you have to do these maths :  ...G/s X (...cycles / every ... cycles ) X (Active during ...cycles / per ... cycles ) = ... real nat gas G/s

For example, if i have a nat gas with these stats : 295G/s, eruption period : 158 per 254 cycles, and active period : 87 cycles per 139 cycles, i'll have :

295 X (158/254) X (87/139) = 114.85G/sec wich can make run one gas nat gen + a little bit for another gas nat generator if you need a little more of 800 w/sec (This is the case for all the geysers i've found so far)

 

.. or you can use this very  usefull calculator : https://onical.ga/

 

[Papartichaud]

It's always better to understand how math works before using calculator ! Meh kids nowadays...

[martosss]

30 minutes ago, Papartichaud said:

It's always better to understand how math works before using calculator ! Meh kids nowadays...

I just tried using it for the fun of it....

"comsumption"... "How is it work" (ah, author is japanese.. that explains the typos) ... + I gave it a cool steam vent(4kg/s,250s/500s 50/100 cycles) and it's telling me that I should store steam in 20kg/tile, 30 tiles/cycle .. yea right, as if I wouldn't condense that steam into water and store x50 more/tile

I'd say thanks, but no thanks - I'd rather do the math myself. And if you have weird numbers(although that's not really an excuse) you can always use the calculator on your PC.... it even has scientific mode!

[Craigjw]

You've jinxed it for me, after 500 cycles of my iron pump working at 39C, it now breaks due to overheating...

[SamLogan]

I noticed that NG geyser can be really hot if you break too much the pression in it room. I've a stable temperature with an atmosensor that let 2 Kg/tile.

In fact, the geyser will be able to heat a small amount of gaz, so you need to overhelm it but under 5Kg/tile to don't have overpressure.

Don't forget, the NG gaz goes out at 150°C, that's why it can heat the room if the local mass is too low.

[Whispershade]

A lot of people have offered their solutions and they work. But gas geysers aren't complicated. They expel their gas at 150c and stop producing if pressure reaches 5kg. So if they over pressure, you're losing vent time and reducing the over all volume of energy you're receiving from the geyser.

I don't personally like using wheezeworts, if I don't have to, so I prefer to run coolant from waste water production to keep the temperature under 100c. And make sure you use gold amalgam to build your pumps. Don't let the pressure drop too low or you'll get temperature spikes on venting. So I keep an atmo that shuts off the pump at 1500 or whatever. A run off chamber that you fill with an heavy vent lets you bank more of the gas for the dormant cycle if you haven't burned through it.

You can build it so the pump from the geyser has priority to your gas generators, but if it backs up it goes to the overflow room which then only pumps gas if the gas geyser line is empty. You can do that with proper bridging. As bridging out of a pipe will consume all the input unless the line is backed up, and bridging onto a pipe will prevent the bridge from feeding into the pipe unless there is space to do so, giving priority to the main pipe.

[Elerius]

The lesson that I learned recently is to not get too dependent on the power that the NG geyser provides, because when it goes dormant you can get in big trouble due to the power loss. One way to work around this is to pump the NG into a large storage room with a high-perssure vent. This allows you to survive the dormancy on the NG storage. Of course, this assumes you aren't using the full capacity of the NG the vent is providing. If you research the vent, you can do the math to figure out how much NG it is safe to depend on having assuming you can store 100% of the output.

What I ended up doing instead, was pumping a trickle of crude oil onto a gold volcano output, then using the resulting NG from that to produce power. It didn't matter that the gold volcano went dormant for a while, because the volcano output held enough latent heat to continue to vaporize oil until its next active period.

[Papartichaud]

20 hours ago, SamLogan said:

I noticed that NG geyser can be really hot if you break too much the pression in it room. I've a stable temperature with an atmosensor that let 2 Kg/tile.

In fact, the geyser will be able to heat a small amount of gaz, so you need to overhelm it but under 5Kg/tile to don't have overpressure.

Don't forget, the NG gaz goes out at 150°C, that's why it can heat the room if the local mass is too low.

 

17 hours ago, Whispershade said:

A lot of people have offered their solutions and they work. But gas geysers aren't complicated. They expel their gas at 150c and stop producing if pressure reaches 5kg. So if they over pressure, you're losing vent time and reducing the over all volume of energy you're receiving from the geyser.

 

17 hours ago, Elerius said:

The lesson that I learned recently is to not get too dependent on the power that the NG geyser provides, because when it goes dormant you can get in big trouble due to the power loss. One way to work around this is to pump the NG into a large storage room with a high-perssure vent. This allows you to survive the dormancy on the NG storage. Of course, this assumes you aren't using the full capacity of the NG the vent is providing. If you research the vent, you can do the math to figure out how much NG it is safe to depend on having assuming you can store 100% of the output.

All these "problems" : geyser heating gaz too much or overpressure are fixed with this little and easy automation.

The door compression system will work if the pressure of the room is over 1kg of gaz, so the nat gaz that stays in the room gets cooled when the pressure is bellow 1kg and when the geyzer is on active period, it will be sucked by the door pump so it won't overpressure.

It has been working totally fine for me for more than 1000 cycles now

[Eraseri]

On 08/08/2018 at 5:26 PM, Papartichaud said:

All these "problems" : geyser heating gaz too much or overpressure are fixed with this little and easy automation.

The door compression system will work if the pressure of the room is over 1kg of gaz, so the nat gaz that stays in the room gets cooled when the pressure is bellow 1kg and when the geyzer is on active period, it will be sucked by the door pump so it won't overpressure.

It has been working totally fine for me for more than 1000 cycles now

 

Im very interested in this build. So what will happen to co2? It looks to me that it only stays in that chamber? Doesn't it eventually overpressurize?

[PhailRaptor]

On 8/7/2018 at 1:55 PM, Elerius said:

The lesson that I learned recently is to not get too dependent on the power that the NG geyser provides, because when it goes dormant you can get in big trouble due to the power loss.

That's why you should work off the adjusted "true" per second rate, instead of using the eruption period rate.  Actual rate = (eruption rate) x (eruption uptime divided by total eruption period) x (active duration divided by total activity period).  This gives you the real-time per second rate, taking into account both activity and eruption downtimes.  As long as your consumption is less than that rate, you will not run out.  Your only potential downfall is if you do not have an adequate storage area leading to the Vent overpressurizing.

20 hours ago, Eraseri said:

Im very interested in this build. So what will happen to co2? It looks to me that it only stays in that chamber? Doesn't it eventually overpressurize?

If I'm reading the automation in that screenshot correctly, it uses a door compressor.  The cycle starts with only the last door on the right closed, the rest are open.  When it does a compression cycle, the other doors close, one at a time, from left to right, the far right door opening before the one to it's left can close.  As the doors close, they keep pushing the CO2 to the right, since the doors in that direction will be open.  In this way, you can store absolutely massive quantities of gas (or liquids) in very small spaces.  Stick a Pump in the pocket to the right of the final door and you can pull out whenever you need.

It's a side effect of Doors being impervious to fluid pressure.  Solid tiles will break under the strain (including the Insulated Tiles in the screenshot -- a more finished compressor build would be edged with more Doors).  It is an arrangement that some in the community are uncomfortable with due to the implications, that as yet Klei has not made a clear decision on whether it should be in the game or not.