Compact Oil Refinery
Description
This is the oil refinery I designed for maps like You Shall Not Pass, where space is at a premium. It turns up to 450 Crude Oil a month into Diesel, Sulfur, Rubber, Fertilizer I and/or II, Plastic, Hydrogen, Ammonia, and some Slag if you don't use all the Sulfur. It's not the best design for extracting every unit of resources you can from each drop of oil, but it does a lot for the space it takes.
Features:
- Can be built in several stages as you research the relevant technologies. The minimum research needed to start building it is Advanced Diesel, Pipes II, and Gas Combustion. Then you can add the other parts as you research them until you have the full refinery.
- Can be connected to an external Steam source. You can pipe in Steam from a nuclear reactor or other source and it will be prioritized over burning oil products (other than excess Fuel Gas that would otherwise be flared). Then water comes back out the other pipe.
- Designed for truck access. All the imports and exports other than Crude Oil, Water, and Steam are connected to storages along the side, so everything else can be handled by trucks if you don't want to connect it to transports.
- Built-in Exhaust Scrubber can take care of most of the pollution. There's also a spot for relatively easy connection of the Exhaust and Carbon Dioxide pipes to route them to an external scrubbing and/or CO2 disposal facility instead of the Smoke Stack.
- Can import excess Sulfur and/or Fuel Gas from other sources for processing or disposal. The Sour Water pipe is easily accessible if you want to connect Graphite production or something, but the Sour Water treatment can only handle the amount it produces when operating at full capacity, unless it's running on external steam.
- Has an optional pipe to connect Ethanol to the Rubber and Plastic production.
Things you might not like:
- The piping is a bundle of spaghetti, so it's not easy to understand or modify.
- This was designed before Hydrogen was usable as fuel, so it doesn't have enough Hydrogen production for a bunch of vehicles, and the output will stall if you don't use enough Diesel.
- This design doesn't export any Fuel Gas, instead converting it to Hydrogen. I didn't see any reason to export Fuel Gas since Hydrogen can be used for everything you'd want to use Fuel Gas for, but it does mean you need to research a couple more things before getting access to it.
- It's not scalable. Everything was designed to roughly fit the ratios I found myself using at the time, and it's designed to run off one Pipe III of Crude Oil. If you want more of something, you'd have to build another refinery. That said, one of these should produce enough of everything (except maybe Fertilizer) for a good midgame island with 180 trucks and a few cargo ships.
- There are a few tradeoffs in yield for the sake of space. For example, it flares excess Ammonia instead of electrolyzing it to Hydrogen, and there's a quirk that forces it to flare any Naphtha or Heavy Oil that cracking can't handle when running on external Steam, instead of burning that bit of excess like normal (though you can pause the two extra Distillation Stages and change the Steam priorities if you know there's enough external Steam to run the refinery). The Fuel Gas cracking also can't quite handle as much Fuel Gas as it makes, so unless there's demand for Hydrogen, that will get burned even when running on external Steam. The Exhaust Scrubber can't handle as much Exhaust as it can generate under full load when also making Plastic, but it wasn't to the point of being worth adding a second Exhaust Scrubber.
Comments (3)