Oil Refinery
Output: Petroleum
Duplicant operation
Red: Disable
Oil Refinery converts Crude Oil into Petroleum in 2:1 ratio. Both input and main output use Liquid Pipes, and it will also emit Natural Gas to the environment. It has to be operated by Duplicant.
The building will be disabled when the surrounding pressure exceeds 5 kg/tile.
Both output resources have a minimal temperature of 75 °C167 °F, and will be hotter if input Crude Oil was above 75 °C167 °F.
Ratios
The resulting Petroleum can be used either to generate power in Petroleum Generator, produce plastic in Polymer Press or as an essential ingredient to produce Super Coolant in a Molecular Forge.
One Oil refinery can supply up to:
- 6 Polymer Presses, or
- 2.5 Petroleum Generators.
By-product Natural Gas can be burned in Natural Gas Generator, Oil Refinery produces exactly enough to power one generator continuously. Counting a Liquid Pump at 100% uptime for the Crude Oil input, a Gas Pump at 18% uptime to pump Natural Gas (assuming no filtering is needed), the system consumes 763.2 W, which makes it slightly power-positive without any Petroleum Generator, as a Natural Gas Generator can produce 800 W.
Heat economy
Its conversion inefficiency becomes an enormous boon for the purposes of cooling. The refinery becomes net heat negative with ~40 °C104 °F oil. Supplying it with 50 °C122 °F oil will erase 20% of input's heat (or ~160 kDTU/s in absolute numbers, as much as 2 AETN). At 75 °C167 °F it raises to 46%, but there is no meaningful gain in efficiency (only absolute numbers) at temperatures above that.
Crude Oil being convenient heat-sink is a nice coincidence.
