The Problem
- Coal Liquefaction needs far more refineries to produce the similar amount of products compare with crude oil. Therefore they occupy a much larger footprint in comparison
- If you beacon the coal liquefaction process, the refineries require very large quantities of coal on belts. It's difficult to produce the classic North to South Beacon->Chemical Plant->Shared Beacon->Refinery->Beacon typed build
- If you're not careful, a liquefaction build can stall because too much heavy is cracked so that there is not enough left as input into the refineries
I wanted a liquefaction build that considered all the above, and which would produce similar output to the 5:1:7 beaconed crude oil build. This is the result.
- It is similar to my pre-beaconed balanced liquefaction build and can be placed in the same footprint space
- It produces almost 48K gas a minute, about 60 per minute more than a crude refinery 5:1:7 build
- It does not allow all the heavy to be used, and therefore does not stall
Instructions for Use
- Place the Blueprint
- Connect the build to:
- water (3 locations at the top of the build)
- power at the top left
- coal (1 location in each of the North, West and East)
- The Northern coal feed requires a full red belt, the East and West feeds each require 2 blue belts
- Insert at least one barrel of heavy oil into the assembler at the top left
- Watch how the refineries start working one by one
- The refineries are now running in a closed loop, with the only output being gas on the right hand side, about two thirds down on the screenshot
Notes
- After bootstrapping the build with at least 1 barrel of heavy oil, it is safe to remove the assembler
- The concrete in the screenshot is not part of the blueprint
- The blueprint includes Creative Mode entities only to supply the coal, water and power and to consume the gas. Without these entities, you can use the build in vanilla.
- A pump is used, measuring the fluid level of heavy in the tank, to stop too much heavy from being cracked. This stops the build from stalling. On paper, this tank and pump are required, but if you remove them and just pipe the heavy into the crackers, the build still works. This appears to be a bug in factorio which, if fixed, would mean that the build WOULD stall if there was no tank and pump