Sour gas = Hydrogen Sulfide

[ImpalerWrG]

We now have a new gas that results from boiling oil.  The main goal seems to have been to nerf oil-boiling crazy NG production.  But the name of this gas 'sour gas' is a real term used in the Petrochemical industry.  Sour gas is Natural gas contaminated with Hydrogen Sufide (H2S), some gas wells can be up to 90% Hydrogen Sulfide but under 10% is more typical.  Purifying or 'sweetening' is normally done before using gas.

Now I would propose that Sour Gas will be explicitly named Hydrogen Sulfide and their be methods to chemically modify it.

Their are two major industrial processes used on Hydrogen Sulfide, the 'Wet Acid' process which produces sulfuric acid, and the Dry process which produces solid sulfur.  Two different structures can be used here that might be able to process other substances here that have a similar reactions possible.

The Wet process consumes H2S and O2 gas and produces acid and lots of heat, enough to boil steam and help run a turbine.

The Dry process consumes H2S and O2 and produces solid sulfur and water, again with large heat output and steam generation.

Adding Hydrogen sulfide gas as an output from volcanoes and as it's own geyser would be a good step.

[neoazureus]

Wiki in game says:

Quote

Sour gas is a hydrocarbon gas containing significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide

So, you are right, and I think that Klei will give us a tool for use this new gas.

[Sasza22]

I`m ok with them providing a system for purification sour gas. It just has to take enough power so that oil boiling is still not the best thing ever and not as much to make it completely worthless.

I wonder if the whole process could be simplified so that they won`t add more elements. Probably possible. Then again sulfur might open an entire new tree of possibilities. Pyrite might become one source of it as well.

[Xenologist]

Theoretically, sour gas shouldn't naptha-ify as soon as it is below 538 c or 1001 f. In fact, natural gas may make the same amount of sense boiling petroleum (It is refined crude oil, remember, and shouldn't it be sulfur-less) or propane.  Petroleum is chains of hydrocarbons, refined hydrocarbons (Could've put hydrocarpons) And at the same time, Does Naptha make sense at said boiling point? Literal car fuel we're talking about here. Naptha shouldn't come from melting plastic, if anything, plastic should melt into molten plastic, and maybe even change the look of solid plastic tiles to be the white plastic glory. If anything, sour gas should come from sour gas geysers, refinable, and special vents/geysers/volcanoes could shoot out sour gas or even hydrogen sulfide, sulfiric acid, or molten sulfur (How safe is molten sulfur?) 

[ImpalerWrG]

Yes, Naptha really doesn't make sense in the game right now.  First Naptha the term can apply to several things, one of which is perfectly usable as a fuel and which vaporizes at lower temperatures then Kerosene which is what I've always taken Petroleum to be analogous too. 

I think the intent was for Naptha to be more like 'Coal Tar', which is a really vicious complex mixture that's hard to use as a fuel, at best it can just be used in a boiler for heat, not in an internal combustion engine or rocket as it would clog them too easily.  An even more solid substance would be Bitumen which is what 'asphalt' roads are made of.

I couid see the oil refining being a 2 stage process, the Refinery takes crude oil and produces Naptha liquid and 'Natural gas' which is no longer a fuel but just an intermediary, Geysers emit NG so they need processing before use.  These can both be put into new 'Cracking tower' buildings which splits them as follows.  Naptha becomes Tar and Kerosene (which replaces Petroleum) and emits gaseous CO2.  Natural gas becomes Methane and Hydrogen Sulfide gas and produce solid coal residue.  Methane is then used as a fuel.  Tar can be boiled at high temperature to produce Coal and Natural Gas.  Tar can be found in solid form  in a new biome layer above the oil layer, maybe associated with fossils.

 

[Mariilyn]

Its a very interesting subject. I'm optimistic about the potential incoming changes related to the crude oil/petroleum economy and would like to share some thoughts about this : 

 

1. In this specific case, naphta seems to designate a mixture of contaminated light petroleum. It can't be similar to coal tar, because this substance would not have evaporated during the boiling of the crude oil.

From wiki (Petroleum Naphtha) : is an intermediate hydrocarbon liquid stream derived from the refining of crude oil[1][2][3] with CAS-no 64742-48-9[4]. It is most usually desulfurized and then catalytically reformed, which re-arranges or re-structures the hydrocarbon molecules in the naphtha as well as breaking some of the molecules into smaller molecules to produce a high-octane component of gasoline (or petrol). [...] Naphtha is a general term as each refinery produces its own naphthas with their own unique initial and final boiling points and other physical and compositional characteristics.

From wiki (Naphtha) : Mixtures labelled naphtha have been produced from natural gas condensates, petroleum distillates, and the distillation of coal tar and peat.

 

On 8/24/2018 at 8:15 PM, ImpalerWrG said:

Now I would propose that Sour Gas will be explicitly named Hydrogen Sulfide and their be methods to chemically modify it.

2. That would implies that only the impurities have evaporated during the boiling of the crude oil. Sour gas = mostly some kind any gas + an hydrogen sulfide contaminant.

 

3. Methane is natural gas, therefore for the sake of simplicity we should have only one of those element in the game (preferably the generic term), otherwise it would be redundant and confusing.

 

4. Apparently, a very small percentage of the crude oil is transformed into natural gas (1%) during the oil refining process, so we should not expect it to be a major natural gas producer (depending of course of what the dev choose to do with all this)

 

5. No need for a new « cracking tower » building : that's the oil refinery. Apparently some refineries incorporate sweetening processes. Which leads to :

 

6. With the introduction of hydrogen sulfide, it is implied that crude oil is containing impurities. The difficult and confusing question for me is : where in the crude oil refining process should the removal of theses impurities happen ?

 

With that out of the way, here are the chains of transformation what would make the most sense to me : 

 

> Crude oil --- (oil refinery) --- >  natural gas + naphtha + tar (let's assume the refinery does not remove the hydrogen sulfide contaminant)

> Crude oil --- (boiling) --- > sour gas + tar

> Sour gas --- (condensation ) ---> separate into a bit of natural gas + mostly naphtha 

The reasoning behind the last one is that (here comes the totally-not-sure-if-this-is-accurate part : ) natural gas has a lower condensation point than the other sour gas compounds. Another premise is that the natural gas resulting from crude oil refining do not need to be purified. 

 

From here, more speculations : 

> Naphta --- (some kind of process like HDS) --- > petroleum/kerosene + sulfur (maybe)

From wiki (Hydrodesulfurization (HDS)) : is a catalytic chemical process widely used to remove sulfur (S) from natural gas and from refined petroleum products, such as gasoline or petrol, jet fuel, kerosene, diesel fuel, and fuel oils.

From wiki (Petroleum refining processes) : Naphtha hydrotreater unit: Uses hydrogen to desulfurize the naphtha fraction from the crude oil distillation or other units within the refinery. [tungsten can apparently be used as a catalyst] 

From wiki (Petroleum refining processes) : Catalytic reforming unit: Converts the desulfurized naphtha molecules into higher-octane molecules to produce reformate, which is a component of the end-product gasoline or petrol.

 

There is so many things to sort out. It must be near impossible to simplify and incorporate all these concepts into a playable game.

 

[Kabrute]

I agree with this idea, boiling pwater drops dirt so why not boiling oil drop tar

 

[fredhp]

this game need a chemical upgrade, so we can mix different kind of liquids and gases to produce some reaction. Imagine build a chamber, send some gases and wait for them to react, generating new gases, heat and etc? Things like electric arc, lasers or something else to archive some high temperatures to enable some reactions, or instruments like a condenser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condenser_(laboratory)) that allow us to turn a gas into liquid without break the pipes! THAT will be very nice!!!! Can even be one of the actual gas storage tanks with a liquid exit, and a liquid storage with a gas exit..... that would be nice!!!

[ImpalerWrG]

Good points Mariilyn, my main point for Naptha 'supposed to be' Tar was the higher boiling point then is logical for real Naptha.

I'm feeling that Tar could probably just be a new material just as easily and the old Naptha being adjusted to more accurately reflect what you describe a still contaminated mixture of light Petroleum, maybe needing more processing to get the final desirable fuel.

But any product, even an intermediate, should have a use and I think being able to burn some of these dirtier intermediates in a new structure would be appropriate.  But the kicker is that you don't get power from them, the structure is simply a 'boiler' and takes a liquid input and simply converts it to vapor and expels it out of a gas port.  It boils any liquid you can put into it at a rate appropriate to the DTU's delta between in input temperature and the boiling point.  This has obvious uses being paired with a Turbine.

As for the petro-chemical refinement process I dug up this nice diagram

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RefineryFlow.svg

It even includes Naptha as one of the intermediate products which eventually ends up in Gasoline.  Note that Kerosene, Diesel and JetFuel are all basically identical products.  One solution might be to make the Generator run on Gasoline, and make Kerosene the rocket fuel.

Also note the production of asphalt and 'petroleum coke', I think just producing coal here is a good enough substitute.

Lastly the step at the top 'Amine treatment' is the process that 'scrubs' the sulfur from a Coal power plant and is what the CO2 scrubber in game is based on because the chemical Amine extracts both CO2 and sulfur, so i propose that the building now be able to extract both these gasses, which gives the player a means of collecting and managing this new gas.

[D.L.S.]

On 27.08.2018 at 8:00 PM, fredhp said:

this game need a chemical upgrade, so we can mix different kind of liquids and gases to produce some reaction. Imagine build a chamber, send some gases and wait for them to react, generating new gases, heat and etc? Things like electric arc, lasers or something else to archive some high temperatures to enable some reactions, or instruments like a condenser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condenser_(laboratory)) that allow us to turn a gas into liquid without break the pipes! THAT will be very nice!!!! Can even be one of the actual gas storage tanks with a liquid exit, and a liquid storage with a gas exit..... that would be nice!!!

This game need at least fire first, we cant burn fuels in open fire... Then we will need more complex chemistry, agreed.

Condenser you can easily build, game must getting rich with mechanics, and devices we can build by ourself if mechanics alow us(for example condenser you can build now, but simple refrigerator cant because boiling point is static and not depends of gas pressure).

[Mariilyn]

On 8/28/2018 at 1:45 AM, ImpalerWrG said:

It even includes Naptha as one of the intermediate products which eventually ends up in Gasoline.  Note that Kerosene, Diesel and JetFuel are all basically identical products.  One solution might be to make the Generator run on Gasoline, and make Kerosene the rocket fuel.

Also note the production of asphalt and 'petroleum coke', I think just producing coal here is a good enough substitute.

Yes, I looked at a couple of these to make sense of how oil refining works and speculate about in-game implementation. The new element tar was thought as a generic stand-in representing the heavier fractions in the oil refining process. A more accurate term may be bitumen, used to make asphalt concrete / pavement. The main uses for bitumen are road construction and waterproofing.

I thought maybe this was the missing element accounting for the loss of mass in the oil refinery. Heavy fractions can make up as much as 40% of the refined crude oil - although these include more than bitumen alone and the amount produced vary according to the type of crude oil. 

[Sasza22]

19 hours ago, Mariilyn said:

tar

I think tar should be a byproduct of the refinery to handle the missing mass. Then maybe a new building allowing us to change naphta into NG and tar. Tar could then be used with raw minerals (or crushed rocks if that gets added) to make asphalt; a construction material useful for insulation maybe.

[blash365]

At very low temperatures Sour Gas will now condense into natural gas and sulfur.

You got the sulfur part right at least.

On 27.8.2018 at 5:37 AM, Mariilyn said:

> Sour gas --- (condensation ) ---> separate into a bit of natural gas + mostly naphtha 

The reasoning behind the last one is that (here comes the totally-not-sure-if-this-is-accurate part : ) natural gas has a lower condensation point than the other sour gas compounds. Another premise is that the natural gas resulting from crude oil refining do not need to be purified. 

 

From here, more speculations : 

> Naphta --- (some kind of process like HDS) --- > petroleum/kerosene + sulfur (maybe)

Or more.