Methane from Charcoal?

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Daemonblue

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Jul 29, 2019
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Earlier in slowpoke's stream I recall someone mentioning you could get methane from charcoal. Now, I might've misheard this as you can get carbon cells from charcoal after pulverizing it and other things, but if you can indeed get methane from charcoal, how? I know someone mentioned not all of the recipes show properly in NEI, and if that's the case this is one of them.
 

Zaik

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Jul 29, 2019
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one carbon cell and four hydrogen cells make four methane cells.

charcoal dust = carbon cell 1 to 1.

You can generate hydrogen cells fairly quickly by electrolyzing water cells, then electrolyzing the electrolyzed cells. 6 water becomes four hydrogen becomes four methane becomes 45000x4 eu in a gas turbine, you just lose the cell from the carbon cell when crafting the methane, the rest will be re-usable.
 

Daemonblue

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Jul 29, 2019
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The problem would be the loss of the cell though, since I'd want to be able to use it as part of a self-sufficient power system. In the power room thread a method of making methane out of pumpkins and melons was put into action, but if we could come up with something that grows even faster than melons, such as a rubber tree or normal tree farm, then we could enhance the system even further. My current guess is that if you could get a steady rubber tree farm going and centrifuge the methane out of those, use the electric crafting table to take out the carbon from the carbon cells, recycle any used cells, and pump the methane into a HP boiler from railcraft you could be able to build a fairly efficient, self reliant system. For the tree farm my best guess would be to run a Steve's Carts farm, albeit I have no experience with those.
 

TruculentMC

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Jul 29, 2019
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If you use the GregTech crafting table, you should retain all the cells -- I have not tried it with this particular recipe though.
 

TruculentMC

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Well that's good news, no loss of Tin in that case!
I have considered Sugar -> Carbon Cell for making Methane, it seems quite good at first glance, but I didn't check the math yet to see how it compares to grinding up Charcoal.
 

Daemonblue

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With a solid Steve's Carts tree farm then it should be fairly easy to make a massive amount of methane.

Just looked at the eu costs and time for turning charcoal dusts into eu and wow...1 second at 1k eu per carbon cell, so the bottleneck then becomes the hydrogen cells that you can make 4 of +1 compressed air (which can be vented and returned) in 38 seconds using the industrial electrolyzer. However, this is still more than 8 times faster than centrifuging melons for a methane cell. Now to figure out how to automate the electric crafting table :X

Oh, and I did manage to get the melon farm outputting into the centrifuges. For some reason it didn't want to input until I broke a few things.

Edit: Ok, just have to pipe stuff into the green side and it'll work fine.

Edit 2 : And for the methane output it is indeed red. Now to try to find something other than a transposer/filter that will draw the empty cells out, as I don't wanna have to use timers if possible : / Could probably do it with a manager, but I also wanna try it without using blutricity ><
 

Peppe

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Jul 29, 2019
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The electric crafting table works surprisingly well.

If you do centrifuge rubberwood you can send the methane and the carbon cells to the same electric crafting table -- it will pass through anything that doesn't match its recipe right on through to the output side -- if it can't place it holds onto it until it can place it. I have the table set to make methane out of carbon cells and hydrogen cells, and the methane from the centrifuge or the table goes right into a transposer.

I have it outputting directly to a liquid transposer which outputs to a railcraft storage tank.

So far one forestry wheat farm and rubber tree farm are powering a 36 HP bioler quite well. Only at 200 degrees, but it is already making more methane than it is using. Wheat only partially used to make hummus. Some extra wheat and a lot of extra dirt from macerating plant balls from the rubber trees.

Using just buildcraft pipes. Rubber tree farm is filling 3 industrial centrifuges -- looks like maybe with RP2 managers a 4th centrafuge could get going. The bottleneck is the industrial electrolyzer -- being 128 eu/t machines running multiples at the same time moves this out of a cheap option.

Can be very compact though. Using a different tree process you could get it down to basically just a pretty small rubber tree farm to run the biggest boiler.
 

Daemonblue

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I had figured the rubber trees would be better than melons when I saw you get 4x the methane + carbon cells for the same 250 seconds. Also, while the electrolyzer takes a good deal of power to run it still comes out ahead of the centrifuge. Iirc, and I'll check again after I can get on, carbon cells in the electrolyzer take 1k eu, and 4 hydrogen cells take 38k eu. This makes it 39k eu per methane cell. If you just take the methane cells from the centrifuges it's 50k eu per methane cell - if it's 38k per 4 hydrogens and you get 8 carbon cells from the centrifuge, it's 46k eu per hydrogen after converting the carbon. Now this is all going off the top of my head right now, so it might be a little off, but I'll fix that when I can, and is not including the cost to craft.

Also, going by the times I remember, a single electrolyzer working on carbon cells from charcoal dusts can work in tandem with 38 electrolyzers working on hydrogen cells - which should easily be enough to fuel over 20 36hp boilers. So, you should be able to make a good deal of excess carbon cells that you can use for other things, such as carbon fiber.

Edit: And yea, my numbers were WAY off for the hydrogen cells. They take 38 seconds, but use 93k eu per 4, so that makes it 94k eu per methane cell by pulverizing charcoal. This also means for the rubber tree farm if you only pull out the 4 methane cells per centrifuge you make them at 5k eu per, but if you convert the carbon cells into methane it increases to 64k eu per methane cell.

This basically means if you can get a good renewable rubber tree farm going on just convert all your carbon cells into carbon fiber you'll save massive amounts of eu, and since I don't think many people will use more than maybe 5 boilers (and even then that's a massive amount) you shouldn't need a whole lot of machinery to run a large power plant.

Edit: Also derped on the centrifuge, it's 25k eu, not 250k, so it's 5k eu per - gonna fix all the numbers above to reflect it.


Adit: On another note, anyone else randomly lose a pair of shears? I thought maybe I had thrown them but they just disappeared...had to cheat me a new one in considering I paid 3 emeralds for the darn thing and I had just gotten it ><
 

Peppe

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Usually when i think i lost something it has ended up in a random chest. Inventory tweaks or something other mod was moving the item under my mouse cursor to the chest. Or pulling something out. I usually use NEI in that shadow mode (click search box to yellow) and then search your chests for the item.

Anyone know what the burn value is for methane in the boiler? The question is how much methane does the largest HP bioler need to stay hot. If it can be done with 1 forestry rubber tree farm and 3-4 industrial centrifuges then that is the cheapest option. Adding in the electrolyzer would just allow bulk methane production, which may only be needed to startup the boiler.
 

Peppe

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Jul 29, 2019
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Just took out the carbon cell to methane piece and added a centrifuge to my creative test.

One forestry rubber tree farm (wheat farm to automate tree farm) - 4 centrifuges running just rubberwood is building up methane in the storage tank. 36 HP boiler is at about 750 degrees.

Centrifuges and auto crafting table powered by liquid methane in 2 gas turbines off the storage tank.

Rubber tree farm runs a little short on wood for the centrifuges. 3 might do the job and give you some spare wood to use else ware.
 

Daemonblue

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Jul 29, 2019
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Truclent, who came up with the initial design, mentioned in the power room thread that the burn value was around 16000, or half of biofuel. This means at full temp a single cell lasts over 50-ish seconds. Basically, at full heat a single centrifuge running the rubberwood should be more than enough to fuel a single 36HP boiler.

Another thing you can do instead of using gas turbines is use a cobble gen to create lava, then burn the lava in the new gregtech thermal generator. It can produce 30k eu a bucket, 10k more than the normal geothermal (unless directly connected to a pump), at 24 eu/t. Really, my major complaint about this version of Gregtech has to do with the quantum tanks. They can store more than a 7x7x8 railcraft tank in a single block, that and they aren't as aesthetically pleasing imo.

But yea, with that thermal gen you can turn 20k MJ into 30k EU.

Now, for the Turbine, I just threw in a single methane cell into one and set it directly next to an ADSU. Interestingly I thought it would have given 50k eu, but it gave 44,992 eu, so there's some loss happening even when directly next to a machine it's supplying. That said, if the 16000 fuel value in a steam boiler is correct, then a single methane cell should produce somewhere around 145k MJ (not doing the math again, the recent solid nerf doubled all the previous values for liquid, and this is half of the current biofuel so it should be half the MJ). Now, at a 2mj to 3 eu conversion....yea, the boiler ->magma crucible -> thermal generator setup is going to produce a lot more than the turbine and at a higher rate.
 

TruculentMC

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Jul 29, 2019
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Methane appears to have a heat value of 18000, though NEI is not showing the values anymore for it.
 

Peppe

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Truclent, who came up with the initial design, mentioned in the power room thread that the burn value was around 16000, or half of biofuel. This means at full temp a single cell lasts over 50-ish seconds. Basically, at full heat a single centrifuge running the rubberwood should be more than enough to fuel a single 36HP boiler.

Another thing you can do instead of using gas turbines is use a cobble gen to create lava, then burn the lava in the new gregtech thermal generator. It can produce 30k eu a bucket, 10k more than the normal geothermal (unless directly connected to a pump), at 24 eu/t. Really, my major complaint about this version of Gregtech has to do with the quantum tanks. They can store more than a 7x7x8 railcraft tank in a single block, that and they aren't as aesthetically pleasing imo.

But yea, with that thermal gen you can turn 20k MJ into 30k EU.

Now, for the Turbine, I just threw in a single methane cell into one and set it directly next to an ADSU. Interestingly I thought it would have given 50k eu, but it gave 44,992 eu, so there's some loss happening even when directly next to a machine it's supplying. That said, if the 16000 fuel value in a steam boiler is correct, then a single methane cell should produce somewhere around 145k MJ (not doing the math again, the recent solid nerf doubled all the previous values for liquid, and this is half of the current biofuel so it should be half the MJ). Now, at a 2mj to 3 eu conversion....yea, the boiler ->magma crucible -> thermal generator setup is going to produce a lot more than the turbine and at a higher rate.

The gas turbine runs at 16 EU/t and one methane cell is supposed to give 45000 EU, but that is not divisible by 16, so i imagine the 8 loss is from that last fuel tick. If you pump methane in liquid form I don't think there is any waste because you can always keep it topped off at 10 buckets of fuel in the gas turbine.

If you are going to use lava/magma crucibles and the new thermal engines can't they run forever on their own without a boiler? I thought the cobble lava cycle was balanced around 20k EU, so at 30k they will produce more energy than than it cost to make the lava.

For an early game boiler I like the simplicity of running all methane for MJ and EU. Might be better to run a steam turbine or magma crucibles to convert some of that MJ to lava and EU.
 

Daemonblue

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Jul 29, 2019
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The magma crucibles run off of MJ and not EU. They use 20k MJ worth of energy for a bucket of lava, which can be used for only 18k MJ, so it's not self-sustaining. All the methods that convert EU to MJ come at a heavy loss, which makes, say, using an electric engine to run the crucible wouldn't be effective and you would lose more energy than you gain.

The problem with the steam turbine is that it's a massive investment and, with Gregtech, you'd lose a lot of potential eu. What I mean by this is Gregtech's matter fabricator takes 16m EU to create 1 UUM, and it takes 5 UUM for 2 Iron ore (which can be processed into 4 ingots rather easily). This is problematic because while the turbine recipe creates them two at a time, it takes around 99 steel ingots, or 49.5 ingots per turbine. Now, since my last calculations, the amount of steam used was doubled, but so was the output. Even so, over the average lifespan of 41 hours, it only creates 295,200,000 EU. This is at the new 320 steam/tick, or the equivalent of 64 MJ/t. this comes out as 188,928,000 MJ used to create that EU. However, for a fully self-reliant system, you would want to be able to replenish the turbines without having to worry about mining iron. However, each turbine roughly comes out to 792m EU to reproduce via UUM. Now yes, if you had a massive amount of iron you wanted to destroy, you could do that, but with thaumcraft you can always turn iron into other metals fairly easily, and there are many other uses you can use for iron. Basically, it's a massive investment that really doesn't help much. With the Thermal Generator running off of lava create by a magma crucible, for that same amount of MJ you can create 283,392,000 EU, or a 11,808,000 EU difference. So for 11.8m less EU, you can run a system that is fully self-reliant.

Edit: Another thing to note, a single Igenous extruder can quite easily fill a massive row (tried up to 18 before they started using less energy) of Magma Crucibles, and it would take 4 crucibles and 4 Thermal Generators to produce just shy of the amount of power of a steam turbine. This makes the two systems about equal size as well.
 

TruculentMC

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Jul 29, 2019
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All the methods that convert EU to MJ come at a heavy loss, which makes, say, using an electric engine to run the crucible wouldn't be effective and you would lose more energy than you gain.

Did you see my Scrap-fueled Boiler design? It can keep a 36 HP boiler fueled for ~18 EU/t input, that is to say it produces 8 MJ per 1 EU.
 

Daemonblue

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Jul 29, 2019
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True, there is that method. The only problem though is the massive amount of machines require to keep one going though. But then, with that system you could probably set up an infinite feedback loop - use scrap to create MJ at 1 eu per 8, use MJ to produce EU and 2 MJ to 3 EU, so for 1 eu you could create 12 eu, so an 11 eu profit. So as long as you give the system a jump start it could produce infinite energy. The only problem I can see with that though is how many recyclers it would take to expand the system to get a better flow of energy, and with the fact that there are solar panels that can produce a lot more, as well as nuclear fission and fusion reactors, it just seems expanding it to the point where you get a sufficient amount of energy would take a massive amount of time. Gonna do some maths on this real quick:

Going by your 8 MJ per EU, that would mean 144 MJ being produced by 18 EU, if you convert it back into eu that's 216 eu/t, meaning you get a surplus of 198 eu/t. For a system composed of that many recyclers. Now, due to it being 144 MJ, you could only run 7 magma crucibles at full power, with 4 MJ/t dissipating. Those 7 magma crucibles can be fed by one igneous extruder.

Due to the loss of 4 MJ from the system, you would produce 210 eu/t, or a profit of 192 eu/t. This is at the size of around 18 recylcers fed by igneous extruders (not sure if they would have to be 1:1 ratio), a 3x4x3 boiler + the 3x1x3 base, at least one more igenous extruder for 7 magma crucibles, an aqeuous accumulator to feed the boiler water. So in machines, minus the boiler that's 44 machines (if it takes 1 extruder per recycler) plus piping to produce 192 eu/t out of nothing :X

The setup might be ok, but for MJ production alone it would take a lot of work to expand the system past one boiler. Given the sheer size of it, it also makes it kinda meh to produce eu unless you don't want to deal with lava or nuclear power at all - or use the solar panels. So it's workable as a self-reliant energy source, but the effort, space, and machines required makes it more of a "I want to do this because it's hard" kind of thing to build, rather than "I want to build it for its efficiency."

All in all, good idea, not very space friendly.


Edit: I think it might have been inventory tweaks that made my shears go bye-bye. Every time I try to open a bag from Forestry or move it from my bar I get the same kinda thing happening that happened with my shears, it just randomly disappears and then, sometimes it'll throw it or sometimes it'll randomly appear back in my inventory. I think it might be a problem with the auto-refill option.
 

abculatter_2

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Jul 29, 2019
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I've been thinking about this same set-up for a long time, and I think I might have come across the overall best infinite source for methane production.

Tier 5 blaze spawners.

Unfortunately, I don't know exactly how many blaze rods you get per blaze, and I also never did bother to see how much EU all the centrifuges should be taking... However, I do know that a single tier 5 spawner (and they can be put right next to each other for even more in the same amount of space) can spawn 6 blazes every 2 seconds. Assuming there's a 50% chance of a blaze rod per blaze, that means you should get 1.5 blaze rods per second, which can be macerated for 7.5 blaze powder. 8 powder can be centrifuged for 4 coal dust (which gives 2 carbon cells, unlike charcoal dust) for 8 carbon, which will give you 32 methane.

per methane cell, you can produce 324,000 MJ in a steam boiler at maximum heat, which equates to 16.2 lava, and 486,000 EU per methane cell if you use thermal generators.
multiply this by 32, and you get a potential 15,552,000 EU.

Per second. (approximately)

From one spawner.

Granted, this would require an ENORMOUS amount of resources and machines to set-up (30 centrifuges to keep up with the powder production of just one spawner) but you're also producing what is easily the highest production of methane per block of space it is physically possible to have in FTB.
 

Daemonblue

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Jul 29, 2019
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But as mentioned above, using carbon cells to create methane cells requires hydrogen cells. To produce enough hydrogen cells via the industrial electrolyzer for one methane cell takes 93k eu, which is extremely high considering that by centrifuging rubber wood you can get 4 methane cells for 25k eu, or 5k eu per cell. Also, don't you have to stay by the spawner constantly for it to spawn blazes? So that would mean you're using more eu to create methane than a rubber wood farm, AND you have to stand still.
 

abculatter_2

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Soul shards spawners loose that at tier 3.

I said tier 5, which are ridiculously powerful infinite mob machines, which can be put in a box of glowstone a thousand miles away from any player (assuming you have a chunk loader) and still produce a HUGE amount of mobs. And they can be turned off with a lever.

Also, i did not say that it was the cheapest or easiest, all I said is that it's the highest production of methane in the smallest space, since you get HUGE amounts of spawns from just one Tier 5 spawner, they can be put next to each other without problem, and they produce coal dust instead of charcoal dust, which is the second or third most space-efficient method.