Boiling Petroleum vs Petroleum Generator

[Zarquan]

I was wondering whether boiling petroleum is better or worse than using the petroleum in a petroleum generator resource-wise.  To do this, I crunched the numbers to find out what you get from 1 kg of petroleum in terms of boiling and use in a petroleum generator.  I follow the following rules and observations.

1. All CO2 is consumed by slicksters or molten slicksters (looping forever)
2. Sour Gas condenses 1 kg Sour Gas to 670 g Methane (nat gas).

And here are the results!

Keep in mind that the power results should be taken with a grain of salt because there are significant energy costs to making natural gas from petroleum.

There is still a significant benefit to boiling the petroleum, bit it isn't as great as it was before.  You get more water and more energy (because I can not imagine how condensing 1 kg of sour gas could cost 5000 J.  However, you could support more slicksters with the petroleum generator. 

I will still see one of my end game goal as a petroleum boiler for the extra water.

 

[GrindThisGame]

You could slow cook the oil into 2x the petroleum and burn that in the petroleum generator as well.

[Zarquan]

2 minutes ago, GrindThisGame said:

You could slow cook the oil into 2x the petroleum and burn that in the petroleum generator as well.

You mean from the slicksters?  My calculations assume you do that.

[Carnis]

2 hours ago, Zarquan said:

 

You get more water and more energy (because I can not imagine how condensing 1 kg of sour gas could cost 5000 J.  However, you could support more slicksters with the petroleum generator. 

@wachunga pointed out, that with current values, you need 1megawatt of cooling/10kg sour gas condensed. Due to 33% mass loss on methane..

At The moment, condensing high throughput sour gas seems almost impossible.

[XEVEN]

Do petroleum generators still require dupe time?

[KittenIsAGeek]

Petroleum generators haven't ever needed dupe time. Petroleum refineries do.

[XEVEN]

Ah, that's what I was thinking. Haven't really needed to use them.

[Zarquan]

13 hours ago, Carnis said:

@wachunga pointed out, that with current values, you need 1megawatt of cooling/10kg sour gas condensed. Due to 33% mass loss on methane..

At The moment, condensing high throughput sour gas seems almost impossible.

I highly doubt its that hard, we just need a bigger repurposed LOX machine.  LOX machines got pretty efficient.  Remember too that we don't need to cool the sour gas all the way from 500 C to -161.5 C with the natural gas.  We also have the biproducts from the natural gas generators, the polluted water and the CO2.  You can remove a lot of heat with those.  Also, we can heat the crude oil going in to the boiler, which can also remove a lot of heat.

EDIT:  I made a few math mistakes.  I ran another thought experiment in a later post.

I haven't actually run an experiment yet, but I am happy to run a thought experiment.  I will assume perfect heat transfer.  I will have 14.9 kg of sour gas, 10 kg natural gas, and 7.5 kg polluted water (which are approximately the ratios we would actually have for 10 kg natural gas).  With 70C crude oil entering the boiler system, assuming you heat the crude oil to 400 C with the sour gas, you would cool the sour gas from 535C (some temperature is lost in vaporization) to 241.2 C.  I think at this point, I would run the output natural gas through.  I will assume I previously heated the natural gas to 0 C with the sour gas later down the line.  I will aim to cool the sour gas to around 100 C.  That heats the natural gas to 182.6 C, which I feed to the generators.  Now I introduce the cold polluted water at 0 C as well.  Using that, I will cool the sour gas to around 10 C, which will heat the polluted water to 81.3 C.  Now, I use the super-cooled natural gas at -161 C and transfer heat in to it from the sour gas, heating the natural gas to 0 C.  That cools the sour gas to -114.52.  To get it to condense, you would only need around 850,000 W of cooling for the 10 kg sour gas.  This is significantly less than 1,490,000 J/s (1,000,000 / 10 * 14.9), but not by as much as I would have hoped. 

Of course, this leads to practical concern of keeping a natural gas generator at 0 C while it holds 182.6 C natural gas, but I'm sure there's a way.

EDIT: I just noticed that you were cooling 10 kg sour gas, not heating 10 kg natural gas, but my numbers are still below your projections.

I made a typo in my units.  Oops.  It said 900 watts.  I also rounded up because the number was small.

EDIT my numbers are slightly off, I will fix tomorrow.

[Carnis]

900W will cool 10 grams, you & I came up with The same numbers.

For 10 000 g (kg), you need 900 kW.

[Zarquan]

43 minutes ago, Carnis said:

900W will cool 10 grams, you & I came up with The same numbers.

For 10 000 g (kg), you need 900 kW.

I fixed it, but it's still way more efficient.  I'm cooling half again as much sour gas (14.9 kg sour gas) with less energy. 

I also didn't add in transferring heat to the 0 C CO2, which we want to do anyway since we are sending it to the slicksters, but I think that would be just reducing the output temp of the polluted water.

If you wanted 10 kg/s of sour gas, then you would only need around 570,500 W, which is 14.5 thermoregulators with hydrogen working non-stop.  That takes 3480 W of power.  It could also be ~4 aquatuners with liquid oxygen,  which is more expensive at around 4800 W.  It would take at least 48 wheezeworts to keep the regulators cool (or exploits).

I was honestly hoping for better numbers than that.

If we could get the sulfur in on this cooling, we could go a significantly larger reduction, down to 198,600 W for 10 kg sour gas.  That would only be around 5 thermoregulators (5.06), costing around 1215 W to run.  That would only take 16.55 wheezeworts to cool.  I hope they let us use sulfur soon.

Either way, the process gains us 53,500 J in generator output for 10 kg sour gas, so it's worth it. 

[Carnis]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

I fixed it, but it's still way more efficient.  I'm cooling half again as much sour gas (14.9 kg sour gas) with less energy.

Can you spell out how you came out with 850kW? Your number is still off by a lot.

[psusi]

8 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I will assume I previously heated the natural gas to 0 C with the sour gas later down the line

Say what now?  How is cooling the sour gas with the already hot natural gas going to lower its temperature to 0 C?

Also what do you get from condensing sour gas?  Why not simply vent it to space?

[Zarquan]

6 minutes ago, psusi said:

Say what now?  How is cooling the sour gas with the already hot natural gas going to lower its temperature to 0 C?

Also what do you get from condensing sour gas?  Why not simply vent it to space?

1 kg sour gas condenses in to 670 g natural gas (liquid) and 330 g sulfur now.  So the natural gas that comes out starts at -161.5 C.  Therefore, I would need to.heat it to get it to 0 C.  I heated with the warmer sour gas.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

1 kg sour gas condenses in to 670 g natural gas (liquid) and 330 g sulfur now.  So the natural gas that comes out starts at -161.5 C.  Therefore, I would need to.heat it to get it to 0 C.  I heated with the warmer sour gas.

Ahh, I see... so you have to get the sour gas very cold and it turns into NG, then you can warm that NG back up to help cool the sour gas.  Complicated, but I guess it works.  What do you do with sulfur?

[Zarquan]

58 minutes ago, psusi said:

Ahh, I see... so you have to get the sour gas very cold and it turns into NG, then you can warm that NG back up to help cool the sour gas.  Complicated, but I guess it works.  What do you do with sulfur?

Well, I would use an autosweeper to sweep it to cool the sour gas more.  But I believe sulfur isn't sweepable because nothing can store it.  So I just leave it where it is for now.

[medicdude]

You get an enormous amount of cooling from heating polluted water then clamping it to 40C thru a sieve.

Or just find a slush geyser.

Even some wheezeworts in hydrogen make a ridiculous amount of cooling.

[Zarquan]

Just now, medicdude said:

You get an enormous amount of cooling from heating polluted water then clamping it to 40C thru a sieve.

Or just find a slush geyser.

Even some wheezeworts in hydrogen make a ridiculous amount of cooling.

I really want this to be as self-contained as possible.  Colonies have a lot of heat sources, so I would prefer to not use things like slush geysers for this so I can use the slush geysers for other cooling needs.  I would also like to avoid using the water sieve because some people don't like it.  Plus, I don't want to be too reliant on things like that because I bet it will eventually be fixed, especially with the recent change to the polluted water specific heat.

[0xFADE]

I used water to keep some regulators cool(that were cooling hydrogen for lox) and when the temperature got high I would send that hot water out to whatever. 

[Zarquan]

10 hours ago, Carnis said:

Can you spell out how you came out with 850kW? Your number is still off by a lot.

I got that by messing up on something.  I have decided to start again.

Starting with 10 kg sour gas 538.9 C, which results in 6.7 kg natural gas -161.5 C, 5.025 kg polluted water -20 C, 1.675 kg of CO2 -20 C, and 10 kg 70 C crude oil. 

I transfer heat from sour gas to crude oil up to 400 C.  That cools the sour gas from 538.9 to 245 C.

I then transfer heat from sour gas to natural gas, cooling it to 121.7 C.  This heats the natural gas by 159.4 C, from -0.5 C to 158.9 C.

I then transfer heat from sour gas to polluted water.  I cool the sour gas to -0.5 C, which heats the polluted water to 90 C.

I then transfer all the heat I can from the -0.5 C sour gas to the -161.5 C natural gas.  I heat the natural gas to x, cooling the sour gas to -125 C, heating the natural gas to -0.5 C. 

That leaves 36.5 C that needs to be removed, resulting in 692,350 J that need to be removed.  We will use thermoregulators to move the heat from the sour gas to the polluted water and CO2, heating each to 110 C.  The polluted water can take 421,800 J.  The CO2 can take 184,200 J of heat.  That covers 606,000 J of heat, therefore only leaving 86,300 to be removed.  That can be dealt with by using 7.2 wheezeworts. 

It will take 21 thermoregulators to manage this heat transfer at the rate of 10 kg/s of sour gas.

21 thermoregulators costs 5040 W to run.  Easily covered by the power gains of boiling vs .

Once we can move the sulfur, we can reduce this cost significantly and the system should net cool, but I don't have the sulfur numbers in front of me right now.

[psusi]

38 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

Starting with 10 kg sour gas 538.9 C, which results in 6.7 kg natural gas -161.5 C, 5.025 kg polluted water -20 C, 1.675 kg of CO2 -20 C, and 10 kg 70 C crude oil. 

10kg of crude cooks into 10kg of sour gas, which when liquefied gives only 6.7kg of natural gas?  Is 6.7 kg of natural gas really better than 5 kg of petroleum plus some ng from a refinery?

 

[Zarquan]

29 minutes ago, psusi said:

10kg of crude cooks into 10kg of sour gas, which when liquefied gives only 6.7kg of natural gas?  Is 6.7 kg of natural gas really better than 5 kg of petroleum plus some ng from a refinery?

 

6.7 kg natural gas is better than 5 kg petroleum and 90 g natural gas in a generator in all respects, even CO2 production.  The 6.7 kg natural gas is better than 10 kg of petroleum, so 3.35 kg natural gas is better than 5 kg petroleum.  And 3350 g natural gas is better than 90 g.

I see the oil refinery like the rock granulator for metal refinement.  An earlier game way of getting oil, but not very efficient. 

[psusi]

Oh wow, the NG output from the refinery really does suck.  Also gram for gram, NG seems way overpowered compared to petroleum.  IRL, petrol has far more energy content than NG, not the other way around.

 

[Zarquan]

6 minutes ago, psusi said:

Oh wow, the NG output from the refinery really does suck.  Also gram for gram, NG seems way overpowered compared to petroleum.  IRL, petrol has far more energy content than NG, not the other way around.

 

Actually, gram per gram, gasoline has a lower specific energy than natural gas.  But not that much more.  Natural gas holds 53.6 MJ/kg and gasoline holds 46.4 MJ/kg.

By volume, gasoline holds a lot more energy because its density is much greater. 

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

By volume, gasoline holds a lot more energy because its density is much greater.

Ahh, right.