This is pretty cool the more I think about it. It's going to be one pretty complicated machine. I had to build a whole flowchart to figure out the best path from oil to efficiency. Spoiler alert, but I think I have the most efficient design, and I will outline it here so people can check my math. But, I *think* if I set this to maximum efficiency, one typical oil spout *should* be just enough to clear out one 64x64 crater from around sea level. And that's perfect for my one-shot video I want to make of it. *OR* I'm off by an entire decimal point, which would suck.
Fake edit: As I'm writing this out, I'm seeing I had calculated everything wrong to this point, so ignore that part and keep reading!
In basic terms, I will need to extract the oil from the ground, run it through a multiblock machine to heat it (I will need to combine it with lava, so I will need to set up a pump in the nether). Then, I take the searing hot oil and run it through the distiller. This will separate it into two fluids, residue and distilled oil. If you burn any oils that still have the residue, it can build up in the engines and burn them out if you don't remove it. This cuts that out right off the bat.
The distilled oil is then cooled down to "hot" temperature from "searing" and run again through the distiller. This separates into two more fluids, 2 parts dense fuel for 10 parts mixed light fuels (from 8 parts base oil, so bonus!). Dense fuel is the best fuel, perfectly clean and efficient. That just gets cooled and put into a tank to be used. The mixed light fuels gets cooled and then run through the next distiller, creating 4 parts fuel and 16 parts gasseous fuels, both of which are cooled and used.
Each of the three remaining fuels have their own stats:
1 bucket of crude oil * 3 MJ/tick for 10,000 ticks/Buckets = 30,000 MJ/Bucket of crude (BC)
converts to:
2 buckets of gaseous oil * 8MJ/t for 1875 t/B = 30,000/BC
1/2 bucket of fuel * 6MJ/t for 10,000 t/B = 30,000/BC
1/4 bucket of dense fuel * 4 MJ/t for 30,000 t/B = 30,000/BC
All clean burning because of the removal of residue.
But, there's also a cost for conversion as each step requires MJ.
For crude to distilled, that requires 12MJ per 8mb, or a total of 1500 MJ/B
Distilled oil to dense fuel and mixed light fuels requires 24 MJ per 8mb, totaling 3000 MJ/B
Mixed light fuels into gasseous and fuel requires 24 MJ/10mb, totaling 2400 MJ/B
In total, each buck of crude oil is tripled to 90,000 total MJ, costing 6,900, so the total energy per bucket of crude is 83,100 MJ
Thankfully, the cooling and heating process doesn't cost MJ, but it does cost water and lava. I can pump those for free, but they take time.
I'm estimating on the size of the oil supply. I went down a couple of them in creative mode on a different world and they both looked about the same. About 40-50 blocks down in a straight line, into a sphere with about an 8 block radius. Could be off, I'm just going by memory. But, assuming 8 plus the line going down, let's say the average sphere of oil holds about 850 buckets. 850 buckets with max efficiency by my calculations comes out to a total of 70,635,000 MJ's per oil deposit.
But wait! There's more!
Each of these fuels burn at different rates for different amounts of time and the idea here is to have as close to a steady output as possible. I believe the most efficient rate, at least based on 1.7 buildcraft, is 50MJ/tick. It can take up to 100, but it's a little bit faster for a lot more power. We're shooting for close to 50, but there's something that's going to solve this problem for me:
If you take the total burn time for each fuel, per bucket of crude:
gaseous = 3750 ticks
fuel = 5000 ticks
dense = 7500 ticks
We see that we'll burn through some fuels faster than others, so we need to allocate the right number of engines per fuel type to even it out. Based on my quick in-head math, this means that for every 2 gaseous engines, we need 3 fuel engines and 4 dense fuel engines. I honestly don't know how to show the work on this math but it makes sense to my weird ass brain. Please feel free to tell me I'm wrong.
Dense fuel / 4 engines = 16MJ/tick
Fuel / 3 engines = 18MJ/tick
Gasseous Fuel / 2 engines = 16 MJ/tick
Well whatta ya know, that's 50 per tick! It's almost as if the creator designed it this way, lol.
So, that is the most efficient setup! But what I gots ta know is, how much oil do I need to break the 238,328 blocks that would be present in a 62x62x62 cube? It turns out, this is the hard part. Finding a consensus on how much power it takes to break a block on average. From sifting through the internet as best I can, the most up to date info seems to be that it's 60 MJ to break a block, PLUS a certain amount to move the arm. But that's confusing and I don't need to over complicate it. People who sound smart are saying it's 48/tick to break 5.4 blocks per second. That's 5.4 blocks per 20 ticks, or 960 MJ, or, on average, 177.777777 per block at around these levels. Close enough is close enough.
238,328 * 17.77777 = a total of 42,369,420 MJ expected to run a whole quarry. Compared to my estimated 70,635,000 MJ in a typical oil spout, it *does* appear that it should be enough. But, considering that I want this done in a single take, It might not be a bad idea to go find a second oil deposit and fill up a couple of drums to add to the mix.
Phew!
