Petroleum generator useless efficiency?

[cpy]

Why petroleum generator is so worthless in this game? Nat gas generators are 8.88x more efficient. Why not boost either power 5x to 10kW or reduce consumption to 20% to balance things out and make petrol generator great again? Sour gas cooking would still be roughly 2x more efficient - power losses.

Any thoughts for or against petroleum generator rebalance?

[Coolthulhu]

More like nerf the natgas generator by having it consume 5 times as much, then increase all natgas producers by that much. Petrol doesn't need any buffs, energy is incredibly cheap right now. I keep having to run my petrol gen at full batteries just to feed the slicksters, despite deleting heat through multiple aquatuners (for sleets, LOX, LH2).

[cpy]

Yeah I don't have problem with power, I just don't see any use for that generator at all.

[Lurve]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

More like nerf the natgas generator by having it consume 5 times as much, then increase all natgas producers by that much.

This.  Petroleum gens are roughly in line with coal in terms of power per mass, it's natgas gens that are OP.

Now that we have sulphur as a byproduct, the devs could also close off the mass loop by having oil refineries and petrol gens produce sulphuric waste water.  It would need to be boiled to steam to recycle into clean water, losing some mass to sulphur in the process.  This would give each method of oil use (refinery, petroleum, sour gas) a different ratio of water reclamation to power production, without making any of them strictly suboptimal.  It would also make people who've played Bobangel's face twitch just by being there.

That and all the engines need more CO2 output.  Running a fossil fuel engine in an enclosed space is very a bad idea in real life; handling CO2 in game should be more complicated than "ignore it and feed to slicksters later."

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Ehmm? I largely depend on the petroleum generators for my power. Natural gas is much harder to come by than crude oil. Yes sure, you can go for sour gas cooking, but that takes a huge amount of effort to set up. I don't think casual players will bother with that. I wouldn't take the most efficient way of generating power as the standard by default.

IMO, there should perhaps be more water sources on map generation on average. There are seeds where you strike gold with 3 slush geysers and one hot water geyser, alongside good yield cold steam geysers, but there are also seeds where your only water source are 2 miserable yield cold steam geysers. Water means power.

4 minutes ago, Lurve said:

This.  Petroleum gens are roughly in line with coal in terms of power per mass, it's natgas gens that are OP.

Now that we have sulphur as a byproduct, the devs could also close off the mass loop by having oil refineries and petrol gens produce sulphuric waste water.  It would need to be boiled to steam to recycle into clean water, losing some mass to sulphur in the process.  This would give each method of oil use (refinery, petroleum, sour gas) a different ratio of water reclamation to power production, without making any of them strictly suboptimal.  It would also make people who've played Bobangel's face twitch just by being there.

That and all the engines need more CO2 output.  Running a fossil fuel engine in an enclosed space is very a bad idea in real life; handling CO2 in game should be more complicated than "ignore it and feed to slicksters later."

I wouldn't say they are overpowered. Again, you are reflecting on a very particular way of generation power, through boiling oil to evaperation point and cooling it back down to condending point. Most of us create such a thing because we are slaves to the efficiency, but I think few players who don't play the game at extreme lengths will bother with it. Take away oil boiling and you suddenly realize you have little natural gas sources that produce enough. In my eyes natural gas is highly efficient, but if you don't do the effort for oil boiling, and that's a very understandable choice, it's not something you can depend on.

[Lurve]

But if you do do the effort for oil boiling, it's nearly an order of magnitude more efficient.  So bring that back to maybe twice as much power per mass as petroleum generators produce, and scale up natural gas geysers to compensate for people who don't toil to boil their oil.

[Sasza22]

1 hour ago, cpy said:

I just don't see any use for that generator at all

It`s a great way to produce CO2 for slickster farms. If you want a consistent slickster farm it`s best to have one of those to keep the critters fed.

[cpy]

Anyway I'm gonna start new game with QOL update probably and will try to find seed with good slushies.

Anyways good natgen and slushies and your power is set for life. Except when you have volcano then you have almost infinite steam power?

[fredhp]

3 minutes ago, cpy said:

Anyway I'm gonna start new game with QOL update probably and will try to find seed with good slushies.

Anyways good natgen and slushies and your power is set for life. Except when you have volcano then you have almost infinite steam power?

https://toolsnotincluded.net/

 

 

[Coolthulhu]

5 minutes ago, fredhp said:

https://toolsnotincluded.net/

You know the game design is in trouble when external sites are needed to compensate for lack of functionality in the game.

8 minutes ago, cpy said:

Except when you have volcano then you have almost infinite steam power?

You'd need careful engineering (including door pumping) to run a steam turbine off a volcano for a significant amount of time. It will soak as much heat as you throw at it and output at set temperature.

Steam turbines are only a reliable source of energy if you exploit the chlorine rounding error or the neutronium bug.

[cpy]

I can do fine with just steel.

As long as doors can create vaacuum when opened between blocks to stop heat transfer, then i'm pretty safe.

That seed tool is awesome!

[D.L.S.]

Fuel consumption of all generators require balancing. Hydrogen > natural gas > petroleum(its diesel fuel with weirdly high boiling point?) > coal, it is right hierarchy by energy density.

[cpy]

Also coal should make way WAY WAAAAY more CO2 and for balancing reasons maybe use a bit of O2?

[cpy]

Maybe petroleum generator could be great feedback loop generator if it made like 3x more waste water and 2x more CO2. So you'd make more oil by purifying its polluted water to oil well.

Eh still no auto post merging? Lazy forum!

[JDL]

You may want to consider that power production may not be the player's goal for using a petroleum generator.

Converting crude oil into polluted water through burning it for power produces 1.2 grams of polluted water per gram using a petroleum generator, or 1.06 grams of polluted water per gram using a natural gas generator, assuming you're skimming the carbon dioxide as well. That's more than 10% extra polluted dirt for your sleet wheat farms from petroleum compared to natural gas.

[cpy]

But making petroleum destroys 50% of crude oil, mm but you get 3.33x more oil from water. So it actually is positive feedback loop?

[JDL]

Making petroleum only destroys 50% of crude oil if you use an oil refinery. If you simply heat the crude oil to 400°C manually, it converts at a 1:1 ratio. Even before you create space materials, it should be possible to refine crude into petroleum using metal tiles and magma, with gas control to adjust temperature transfer.

Of course then you need to bleed off the heat, but that's half the fun. Certainly makes a great source of free steam power!

[Coolthulhu]

9 hours ago, cpy said:

Also coal should make way WAY WAAAAY more CO2 and for balancing reasons maybe use a bit of O2?

That would totally kill its usage in early game, all for some realism which doesn't matter.

[Hexicube]

The sour gas process is late game, I don't see why it should be nerfed. Before, when it was petroleum -> nat gas, I would agree (and I argued about it). Now that you have to deal with sour gas, for a proper boiler you require thermium and super-coolant.

[fredhp]

Its possible to condense sour gas using hydrogen and thermal regulators. Its the same build of the old LOX machines....

It is very, very, very inefficient if compared to super coolant ones, but is power positive, and is a good way to harvest sourgas from oil that evaporates due to some magma leakage.

[Hexicube]

Using hydrogen with regulators means 7 times the power cost for cooling, compared to super coolant tuners.

You need to remove 707.5C (optimal circumstances) at a SHC of 1.898, which is 1342.835DTU/g. Since 90g/s of nat gas is 800W, 800W costs 120855.15DTU/s of cooling.

A hydrogen regulator is 240W for 33600DTU/s cooling (1kg/s, -14C, 2.4 SHC), or 140DTU/s/W. At 800W, that's 112000DTU/s, not enough to be energy positive even ignoring other power costs.

You must pre-cool the sour gas using a tuner (pwater is best, assumption is you lack super coolant) in order to actually make power this way, and that assumes you have thermium for the heat or some other way to cool down the sour gas (as well as heat up oil/petro).

This is basically why sour gas processing is late-game, you require two space materials (insulation is nice but not mandatory) to do it properly.

[Lurve]

Or you can use the cooled natural gas to precool the hot sour gas.  Your 707.5C figure should be that, minus whatever the SHCs would equalize to.

[Hexicube]

18 hours ago, Lurve said:

Or you can use the cooled natural gas to precool the hot sour gas.  Your 707.5C figure should be that, minus whatever the SHCs would equalize to.

You need a thermium tuner regardless, 540C will make anything else break unless you're over-complicating it to get around this limitation. If you have a thermium tuner, you should have super coolant.

[D.L.S.]

7 hours ago, Hexicube said:

You need a thermium tuner regardless, 540C will make anything else break unless you're over-complicating it to get around this limitation. If you have a thermium tuner, you should have super coolant.

He meant that you need recycle cold, from already liquid methane to gaseous precooled sour gas, it will conserve some cold inside the system, anyway you dont need liquid methane for generators. So whole system should have 3 heat exchangers: preecooler with pwater as coolant from +550C to ~0C, recycler with methane as coolant(using cold methane from previous batch) from 0C to -125C, and condenser stage with hydrogen as coolant -125C to -165C. This is comes from difference in heat capacity of sour gas and methane, methane have higher heat capacity.

[scaldinghotcarl]

On 11/28/2018 at 10:23 AM, Lurve said:

This.  Petroleum gens are roughly in line with coal in terms of power per mass, it's natgas gens that are OP.

Now that we have sulphur as a byproduct, the devs could also close off the mass loop by having oil refineries and petrol gens produce sulphuric waste water.  It would need to be boiled to steam to recycle into clean water, losing some mass to sulphur in the process.  This would give each method of oil use (refinery, petroleum, sour gas) a different ratio of water reclamation to power production, without making any of them strictly suboptimal.  It would also make people who've played Bobangel's face twitch just by being there.

That and all the engines need more CO2 output.  Running a fossil fuel engine in an enclosed space is very a bad idea in real life; handling CO2 in game should be more complicated than "ignore it and feed to slicksters later."

Let me burn refined carbon in the coal generator. Make i generate half the power and twice the CO2. Then the slickers would be fed and I can use a basically worthless material at end game.

 

And I also depend on the inefficiency of the pertroleum generator Need the pwater and CO2 for farms. It'd be nice if the CO2 was piped as it is in the nat gas gen.