The Captain of Industry’s Journal XVII: Refining Diesel Into Hydrogen and Moving the Glass Facility

We need more space!

We’ve connected most of our industries via rail, reducing the demand on our truck network. However, we’ve realized that coal production, not coal transportation, is bottlenecking some of our industries. Due to this, we decided to construct hydrogen-fired boilers for our power plant and oil refinery, serving as a backup steam source.

This is not a problem with our oil refinery, as we have ample production capacity to cover the added consumption. However, this also meant that we’re burning off more diesel into the atmosphere than before. So, instead of wasting precious resources, we decided to convert the excess diesel into usable hydrogen fuel as well.

Planning & Building the Oil Refinery Extension

Converting 288 units of diesel to hydrogen will leave us with an excess production of 12 units per minute.

At the moment, our updated analysis sheet shows that we’re producing 300 units of diesel per minute. So, we need a factory that converts a little less than this number. We don’t want to convert all of the diesel we’re making, as we still need it for trading and to run our main ship.

So, we decided to go with the following setup:

• 12 Cracking units: 288 Diesel + 36 Steam (high) = 216 Naphtha + 72 Fuel gas
• 9 Cracking units: 216 Naphtha + 18 Steam (high) = 216 Fuel gas + 72 Hydrogen
• 12 Hydrogen reformers: 288 Fuel gas + 24 Steam (high) = 336 Hydrogen + 288 Carbon dioxide

We will also need two Boiler (gas) units powered by hydrogen to run all the systems.

The finished oil refinery extension delivers an extra 264 units of hydrogen per minute.

Since we’ve already unlocked Pipe III (with its 450 units per minute throughput), we will transfer all the diesel via pipes instead of bringing it in via rail. We will also connect the output to the oil refinery station, saving on train stations, but we will build a separate storage unit for the output of this extension.

This extension delivers 264 units of hydrogen per minute, increasing our island’s production to 1,752 units. Even with all the boilers, vehicles, ships, and locomotives that use the resource, we still have an extra 1,182.72 units of hydrogen per minute for future expansion.

Relocating the Glass Factory

The island’s glass factory is now connected to our rail network.

Now that we’ve fixed our oil refinery, it’s time to get back to moving our industries. This time, we’re moving the glassmaking facility next to the brine processing site. That’s because this factory is relatively small, allowing us to place it in the limited available space.

Since our island isn’t demanding that much glass (only 20 units per minute at the moment), we don’t really need a massive site. We have just built a Mixer II that produces 120 units of glass mix per minute and subsequently constructed the corresponding furnaces to utilize this output. This gives us four Arc furnace Is and four Glass makers, which produce more than double (48 units of Glass per minute) what our island needs.

As usual, the station serving the facility takes up the majority of the space (nearly 75% of the total footprint of Glassmaking Facility 2). Nevertheless, this is a crucial part that helps reduce the load on our truck network.

Island To-Do List

1. Relocate and upgrade the cement and concrete slab facility.
2. Relocate the construction parts facility.
3. Relocate the electronics, mechanical parts, and maintenance facility.
4. Relocate the rail facility.
5. Relocate and upgrade the food facility.
6. Build a waste processing facility.
7. Build a fertilizer facility
8. Produce Electronics II.