Dyson Sphere Program | Unlimited Oil, Oil Ratios and Refinery Setup

In this guide, you will learn if processing your oil is worth it. You will need it for energy generation purposes early in the game.

We will also see how much of a change it makes. You will also learn the number of refineries and power plants required to set up some basic, efficient setups. We will evaluate how much energy you can get out of the oil.


Oil As Unlimited Energy Source, Ratios And Refinery Setup In DSP

Oil As Unlimited Energy Source, Ratios, And Refinery Setup | Image credits: rockpapershotgun

Should You Process Oil And How Much?

For starters, we are getting oil @ 2 per second or 120 per minute. If we burn that, we’re getting 6,4 MW of power( factoring in the efficiency rate of a thermal plant at 80%). That’s not a lot, is it? So, let us see if refining works better.

Refining the oil gives us Hydrogen and Refined Oil. If we use both for burning, it gives us 13,44 MW. But refining all that oil can take up to 4 refineries, which consume a lot of power. If we deduct the operating costs, we end up with a net 9,6 MW of power, which is an increase of over 50% over just burning crude. Can we do even better? Let’s check this!

Now, let us have a look at cracking.  It gives us an extra 50% of Hydrogen and some Graphite, but it costs us some refined oil in the process. You also need to add two extra refineries to process it. But the gain?

After subtracting operating costs (6 refineries), we end up with a net of 11,64 MW of power, provided you use up burning all the resources at your disposal.

This gives us about 21% more power than oil processing. It is up to you whether you want to spend the extra time building for the additional 20%.

The final calculation to get the actual net energy generated is to subtract the operating cost of your oil pumps. We did not include it in the calculations because the number of pumps depends on the number of geysers you’re using.

You can do that on your own, depending on your setup. We also did not include the power cost of the sorters because they require so little energy that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

They consume only 0.018 MW each and spend most of their time in an idle state, which amounts to less than a tenth of MW on average for a setup described above.

So, should you process your oil before burning it? We definitely would. You can also do cracking for a little bit of extra cream on top.


Thermal Plant/Oil Ratios

If you do decide to build a setup for this, you’ll need to figure out the ratios of Thermal Plants for each resource since, after fracking, you will end up with 3 different ones. Check out these statistics for your convenience:

The figure for oil is still the same @ 120/min.

In this case, after fracking, you end up with the following:

  • 90 Hydrogen/min
  • 30 Graphite/min
  • 90 Refined Oil/min

If you want to burn 100% of each resource at 100% power load, you will need:

  • 5 plants for Hydrogen
  • 2 plants for Graphite
  • 3 Plants for Refined Oil

So that makes it a total of 10 plants. It’s worth mentioning here that some of those plants will be idle sometimes. For example, you actually need 4,44 power plants to burn all that Hydrogen; however, you cannot build 0,44 of a power plant, so you add an extra one so it can burn the excess.

You must understand that this is the case with every single one of them. You can always drop the last plant and just build 4,1,3 plants, respectively.

You’ll end up with consistent energy output, but it will be lower as a result because the surplus will not be burned. Also, there is the risk of plugging your entire energy network because you won’t be able to deal with all the byproducts.

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We recommend you add the extra plants and create storage buffers between the plants and the refineries producing stuff. This allows you to handle the surplus resources when you are not using 100% power and allows you to reach the maximum output capacity of the said resource.

This will lower the maintenance cost of your plants, too, since you won’t have to worry about what to do with the extra units of resources that could potentially halt your entire production chain.


When Should You Not Process Oil?

As you can see from the previous sections, you need a significant amount of oil intake to properly supply power plants after going through processing and then cracking. If you don’t have enough oil, you’ll end up in a situation where you don’t produce enough of the byproduct to power even a single thermal plant.

Also, less oil means more maintenance costs for refineries and pumps, which will eat into your margins. So, in theory, there should be a point where it’s not worth it to process oil and simply go for burning crude oil. Now, let’s check some possible scenarios:

Oil pump energy cost has been taken into consideration this time; one pump at 840 kW:

  • Case 1: 1 oil/s (60/min)

You need 2 refineries for processing and 1 for cracking. Assume all are 100% efficient. This is the least oil you can pump into an energy setup with cracking for all the refineries to operate at 100% efficiency.

  • Crude: 3,2 MW
  • Processed: 3,96 MW
  • Cracking: 4,98 MW

Case 2: 0.5 oil/s (30/min)

You need 1 refinery for processing and 1 for cracking. However, that one will only be working 50% of the time since you cannot supply enough hydrogen with so little oil.

  • Crude: 1,6MW
  • Processed: 1,59 MW
  • Cracking: 2.04 MW

So you can see that on average, in practice, it will fluctuate a lot since the last refinery only works 50% of the time.

We definitely do not recommend this.


Conclusion

It seems that 30 oil/min is around the point where it stops mattering whether you burn crude oil or process it at all. However, do note that 30 oil/min is not enough to properly supply even a single thermal plant with consistent resources at 100% load. So it’s definitely something you should avoid. Also, we do not recommend processing oil if you don’t have at least 1 oil/sec source available because you simply won’t have enough to support all the power plants.

We chose 2 oil/sec because that’s a decent number to work with for building purposes, and also, it provides a constant flow of fuel. 1.5 can work, too; however, you will have trouble supplying enough graphite for a single thermal plant, so in this case, we would recommend not going for cracking and just sticking to basic processing.

So, To Sum it up

  • If the oil supply is around 2 oil/s, go for cracking.
  • When the oil supply is about 1-1.5 oil/s, stick to basic processing
  • If the oil supply is less than even 1 oil/s, don’t burn oil at all.
  • Overall, the more oil you put into the setup, the more efficient it will be. So if you can put in more than 2/sec, that would be just great!

Thank you if you read the full guide! Hope it really helps. We will be back with another guide that deals with the optimum utilization of Hydrogen as a resource, so do keep an eye on us. That’s it for now!


Last Updated on February 19, 2024

2 thoughts on “Dyson Sphere Program | Unlimited Oil, Oil Ratios and Refinery Setup”

  1. “30 oil/sec” is one hell of an oil production! 😉 It’s obviously a typo and should read “30 oil/min”.

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