On a completely unrelated note, my oil distillery stalled, and I’m really not clear on what to do about it. The distillation tower always has this possibility, because it has multiple outputs. I’ve set my crude oil distillation to stop if any of 4 output hatches gets full.
What’s specifically happening is that I ran out of toluene, because I’m using it for Industrial TNT for my survey trips. My refining setup makes toluene from heavy fuel and naphtha. If the light fuel or refinery gas tanks get full, the distillation tower stops, and I don’t get any more toluene.
Initially it was the refinery gas. That gets converted to LPG, so I added a 128v gas turbine feeding into the battery that normally gets only power from the steam turbines. Initially I was only burning LPG if the steam power couldn’t meet demand over an extended period. Now I’m burning it all the time, and the LPG tank is still nearly 100% full.
Now it’s the light fuel, which gets converted to cetane diesel. Diesel powers the remote sites, acts as an alternate power source for the blast furnaces, and powers the main grid if steam power can’t keep the primary 2kV battery buffer above 50%.
I could add additional light fuel or diesel storage, and maybe additional toluene storage so that I have larger reserves. More storage usually doesn’t solve rate matching problems, but it’s possible I won’t use much toluene for a while. After all, I only used so much because I was looking for tungsten, and I kinda-sorta found that.
I could add logic to convert light fuel to toluene, but only if toluene is very low and light fuel is full. I think that’s a possible conversion, there are so many petroleum conversions I lose track. There’s already logic to convert excess toluene to light fuel, since the normal flow is Oil -> heavy fuel, light fuel, naphtha, refinery gas, heavy fuel + naptha -> toluene, toluene -> light fuel, light fuel -> cetane diesel.