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In order to allow as much heavy oil being refined I am storing excess petroleum and light oil. For this question, lets assume strictly petroleum.

The wiki recommends creating solid fuel. But I don't agree because of this simple math:

petroleum barrels: 250 per barrel, 10 per stack = 2500 units per stack
petroleum solid fuel: 20 per block, 50 per stack = 1000 units per stack

Am I wrong? Or am I missing something?

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  • Why are your focusing on refining heavy oil? Usually the oil product you need the most of is Petroleum. Heavy Oil and Light Oil tend to be a waste product of petroleum production until you have advanced oil processing and can crack it into petroleum. Light oil becomes interesting again when you start making rocket fuel, because it's most efficient to create solid fuel from light oil. But heavy oil is usually only needed for lubricant, and usually you don't need much of that. Did I miss something? – Philipp Jun 29 '17 at 13:19
  • Lubricant! (blue logistics) I have so much excess petro gas that I am deleting it from the game because of the cracking. Not making light rocket fuel yet in my game, soon though. – mxmissile Jun 29 '17 at 13:37
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    By the way, another sink for light oil are flamethrower turrets. They are quite powerful, especially with some strategically placed walls to funnel the enemy attack waves. – Philipp Jun 29 '17 at 14:21
  • Storing massive quantities of solid fuel until you get advanced oil processing is useful as you eventually will need a ton of this in order to create rocket fuel. – enderland Aug 2 '17 at 19:17
  • You can use up the solid fuel as fuel - burn it for power - whereas you can't do that with the barrels? – user253751 Oct 12 '17 at 21:25
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Your math checks out, it is indeed more space efficient to make barrels. It's also faster, you need 1 second to fill a barrel and 1 second to make a barrel for 2 seconds per 250 vs 3 seconds per 20.

It does however require a significant investment of steel. One steel plate per barrel, which is 5 iron ore each. Solid fuel how ever doesn't require any extra resources.

Which is better depends on your current surplus, the benefit of barrels is of course that they can be emptied as needed.

A third option (which requires a bit more map-space but meh) is Storage tanks, at 45 iron (5 steel, 20 iron) it can store 25k liquid as fast as it can be produced and is easily reversible as well.

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  • Didn't think about the material costs, thanks! – mxmissile Jun 27 '17 at 22:03
  • What about fluid wagons? How effective would they be to store this? – Simon Forsberg Oct 12 '17 at 20:52
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    @SimonForsberg Less favorable then storage tanks, they're not as easy to reverse and they cost more then fluid tanks (the recipe is some iron bits + 3 fluid tanks for the storage of 3 fluid tanks), they also need pumps for in- and output – Elva Oct 14 '17 at 10:57

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