Oil Cracking Unit

Introduction

The Gregtech Oil Cracking Unit is a multi-block that thermally cracks heavy hydrocarbons into lighter fractions. Unlike cracking with a chemical reactor, which cracks with 80% efficiency, an Oil Cracking Unit will quickly crack with 100% efficiency.

How to Build

An Oil Cracking Unit is a hollow 5x3x3 (WxHxD) structure that requires:

-1 Controller block; front, centered along one of the 5 block wide sides
-1 Maintenance Hatch; anywhere
-1 Energy hatch; anywhere
-1 Input Bus/Hatch for the hydrocarbon to be cracked; any left/right side (1x3x3) ring casings. This must be on the ring opposite of the ring with the cracked hydrocarbon output hatch
-1 Output Hatch for the cracked hydrocarbon; any left/right side (1x3x3) ring casings. This must be on the ring opposite of the ring with the hydrocarbon input hatch.
-1 Input Hatch for Steam/Hydrogen input; any middle ring (1x3x3) casings
-2 Sets of 8x Cupronickel Coil Blocks, forming a hollow ring on each immediate side of the controller
-Clean Stainless Steel Machine Casings everywhere else

Note that the Oil Cracking Unit, like many other multiblocks, can share walls with other Oil Cracking Units, or technically with anything that uses the same parts.

Why Build One?

As previously stated, the main advantage of having an oil cracking unit is for the 100% cracking efficiency that a chemical reactor cannot achieve. Oil Cracking Unit recipes are generally higher tier, in terms of voltage, than its chemical reactor recipe counterpart, but in terms of speed, when comparing recipes to the chemical reactor, one can see that the Oil Cracking Unit recipes are generally equivalent to standard GT overclock of 4x energy/2x speed, so it is not anymore efficient than a chemical reactor in terms of energy cost and speed (it is, however, still more efficient in terms of how much output liquid you get). For example, Severely Steam-Cracked Butane is a 30 eu/t, 16 second recipe. The Oil Cracking Unit recipe is a 480 eu/t, 4 second recipe. The same generally applies for most other hydrocarbon cracking recipes.