Oil and Refineries

[inqistor]

Actually, looking closer, it seems there is NO AVGAS in-game. When air units is transfered it uses no supply, right?
Also, any supply usage is strictly by mission, not distance, and only bombers uses more supply, which directly shows their need of ammunition (bombs), not fuel.
There is also possible, there is no Gasoline representation, except wastage, during supply transport on larger distances (was it not actually abandoned in one of the patches)? As big vehicles should suck gigantic amount of supply, and they do not.

So, taking away actual smaller-vehicles (planes and cars) gasoline production, does anyone can calculate remaining results?

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel
Turning to the petroleum products side, I'm perplexed by the table. For starters, I would disregard the 1942 values, as they seem likely to reflect the damage sustained by the NEI oil infrastructure in the Centrifugal fighting. As I recall, the Dutch did a good job of laying waste to all the facilities at Balikpapan, for example.

It is also possible, that during battle/war actions production was suspended.

It seems to me that a better understanding of these figures may be needed before they can be used to suggest changes to Japanese petroleum production in the game.

Indeed, numbers do not add in any way. Maybe those were by-products, and actually Refineries should also require some small amount of Resources?

ORIGINAL: Buck Beach
If the petroleum requirements for HI is reduced to zero, would there still be HI outputs?

IIRC, there was no fuel-input for HI in WITP.
But IRL large quantities of material went by train (which should use coal-so Resources), not by wheel transport.

[Pascal_slith]

ORIGINAL: inqistor

Actually, looking closer, it seems there is NO AVGAS in-game. When air units is transfered it uses no supply, right?
Also, any supply usage is strictly by mission, not distance, and only bombers uses more supply, which directly shows their need of ammunition (bombs), not fuel.
There is also possible, there is no Gasoline representation, except wastage, during supply transport on larger distances (was it not actually abandoned in one of the patches)? As big vehicles should suck gigantic amount of supply, and they do not.

So, taking away actual smaller-vehicles (planes and cars) gasoline production, does anyone can calculate remaining results?

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel
Turning to the petroleum products side, I'm perplexed by the table. For starters, I would disregard the 1942 values, as they seem likely to reflect the damage sustained by the NEI oil infrastructure in the Centrifugal fighting. As I recall, the Dutch did a good job of laying waste to all the facilities at Balikpapan, for example.

It is also possible, that during battle/war actions production was suspended.

It seems to me that a better understanding of these figures may be needed before they can be used to suggest changes to Japanese petroleum production in the game.

Indeed, numbers do not add in any way. Maybe those were by-products, and actually Refineries should also require some small amount of Resources?

ORIGINAL: Buck Beach
If the petroleum requirements for HI is reduced to zero, would there still be HI outputs?

IIRC, there was no fuel-input for HI in WITP.
But IRL large quantities of material went by train (which should use coal-so Resources), not by wheel transport.

inquistor, AvGas was never separately modeled in WitP. The original intent was not to turn WitP into 'Quartermaster in the Pacific', though some of us would have wanted a more complex system as an option (whether considering economic inputs or war material outputs).

[Don Bowen]

In WITP, oil was a required input for HI. And supply was directly produced by Resource Locations.

In AE we added two new devices to separate this.

Refineries produce Fuel and the HI input was changed from Oil to (refined) fuel. This stood in for any refined products required by industry.

Light Industry was created to sit between Resource Locations and Supply. LI processed resource to create supply and Resource Locations no longer directly created supply. I seem to recall that these calculations were somewhat confused by the desire to represent food as a supply item. Troops gotta eat.

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: Buck Beach
It is taking me awhile to get an understanding of this part of the econ model (most likely lack of concentration). If the petroleum requirements for HI is reduced to zero, would there still be HI outputs?

Hi requires 2 Fuel and 20 Resources as Inputs, and produces 2 HI Points as Outputs. This is the only "petroleum" requirement in the econ model. Yes, Refineries require Oil In to make Fuel Out, but they don't do much beyond that; they just make Fuel for game (naval) purposes and as an Input for HI. Oil is nothing more than an Input to the Refinery sub-model; it is used nowhere else. Fuel is the spark plug for ships and HI.

[Buck Beach]

ORIGINAL: inqistor

Actually, looking closer, it seems there is NO AVGAS in-game. When air units is transfered it uses no supply, right?
Also, any supply usage is strictly by mission, not distance, and only bombers uses more supply, which directly shows their need of ammunition (bombs), not fuel.
There is also possible, there is no Gasoline representation, except wastage, during supply transport on larger distances (was it not actually abandoned in one of the patches)? As big vehicles should suck gigantic amount of supply, and they do not.

So, taking away actual smaller-vehicles (planes and cars) gasoline production, does anyone can calculate remaining results?

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel
Turning to the petroleum products side, I'm perplexed by the table. For starters, I would disregard the 1942 values, as they seem likely to reflect the damage sustained by the NEI oil infrastructure in the Centrifugal fighting. As I recall, the Dutch did a good job of laying waste to all the facilities at Balikpapan, for example.

It is also possible, that during battle/war actions production was suspended.

It seems to me that a better understanding of these figures may be needed before they can be used to suggest changes to Japanese petroleum production in the game.

Indeed, numbers do not add in any way. Maybe those were by-products, and actually Refineries should also require some small amount of Resources?

ORIGINAL: Buck Beach
If the petroleum requirements for HI is reduced to zero, would there still be HI outputs?

IIRC, there was no fuel-input for HI in WITP.
But IRL large quantities of material went by train (which should use coal-so Resources), not by wheel transport.

I am not talking RL or WITP. I wish to know if I go to the Device section in the Editor and reduce the Fuel In for HI to zero will this still produce an HI output using only the Resources IN (even without any Fuel IN)?[&:]

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: Buck Beach
I am not talking RL or WITP. I wish to know if I go to the Device section in the Editor and reduce the Fuel In for HI to zero will this still produce an HI output using only the Resources IN (even without any Fuel IN)?

Yes

[witpqs]

So - the Fuel input to HI really is representing the "L" and other non-fuel products of POL production, rather than a pot full of fuel? Which means having some Fuel input to HI is OK, right?

[JWE]

Two questions here:

For Buck, one is not able to change the "type" of Input, but one can change the "number" required. Bad news, very bad news, if one sets both to 0, but so long as one of the Inputs is 1 or more, the system will calculate on that basis. (query, why???)

For witpqs, yes. "Oil" needs to be distilled/refined in order to be useful. HI requires a large range of Refinery cracked products to do it's deed. Raw "Oil" don't cut it. Yes, perhaps Hi could have been viewed a level deeper and required 6-8 "Oil" as an Input (presuming a degree of internal processing), but that would have interfered with the whole Refinery model, and made things really ugly in general.

How does one peel and slice an onion? And have the result be good enough to either go on a salad or into a lamb stew?

[witpqs]

John (WE) - I think you misunderstand my query/comment. I was hoping my question would point out that HI should not in this game system be represented by having zero Fuel input. Small Fuel input in deference to coal (represented by Resources) being the energy supply, OK sure. But non-zero to represent the petroleum products other than Fuel.

[vettim89]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

John (WE) - I think you misunderstand my query/comment. I was hoping my question would point out that HI should not in this game system be represented by having zero Fuel input. Small Fuel input in deference to coal (represented by Resources) being the energy supply, OK sure. But non-zero to represent the petroleum products other than Fuel.

I guess it depends on how you look at it. On one side one can make the case that heavy industry does indeed use POL (as you pointed out heavy on the "L"); so, there should be fuel used by HI in AE. A counter argument could be made that fuel in AE represents one thing and one thing only and that is heavy feul oil. The other fractions of POL production including AvGas, Diesel, and gasoline are not fuel but supply in AE terms. It depends on how narrow you want to make the definition of what is fuel in AE terms

I was making the statement that ships in AE use what AE calls "fuel". That commodity would be what we in the real world would call heavy fuel oil for the most part (a little coal and diesel thrown in the mix). Heavy Industry in the 1940's would use little if any of that commodity. In my mind I was contemplating changing the refinery output of "fuel" to reflect just heavy fuel oil while simultaneously lowering the need for fuel for HI. Thinking about it more, it seems less palatible then on first glance. I need to look hard at the numbers

[witpqs]

I see what you mean, but I think that Fuel in AE is like Supply in AE, insofar as it is a group of things rather than just one very specific commodity.

[Andrew Brown]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

I see what you mean, but I think that Fuel in AE is like Supply in AE, insofar as it is a group of things rather than just one very specific commodity.

It does represent a lot of things. To me at least. In general, what "fuel" represents is in the following two broad categories:
[ol]
[*]Heavy fuel oil used by ships.
[*]Every other thing - civilian, military and industrial - that products output by refineries were used for.
[/ol]
Some examples of the second part would include: petrol used by the civilian economy and the military (motorised transport etc.);all lubricants; all fuel used for heating etc. Basically, the way that "fuel" is represented in AE is in a "big picture" kind of way. Since the levers we have in AE to represent the economy are very few, and very crude, I chose to think of fuel in a general sense - what a country needs to import in total for ALL of its (non-shipping) needs - NOT in a narrow sense (as in - how much "fuel" is directly consumed by heavy industry itself).

In other words, look at, say, Japan. Look at how much refined oil products it imported in real life. Look at how much of that was heavy ship fuel. ALL of the other refined products still needed to be imported, so that need is represented in-game by giving HI centres a fuel requirement. Why HI? Because, in my view, the "fuel" requirements of an economy were proportional to how industrialised that economy was, and this "industrialisation" is most directly proportional to how many HI centres each country gets. Countries with large populations but which are less industrialised, such as China and the DEI, have much less HI, so needed a lot less fuel as inputs into their economies.

I hope that explains why HI has a fuel input in AE.

Andrew

PS: These comments exclude the avgas issue. As I have commented elsewhere, I added a supply output to refineries to represent avgas production, but I now think that was a mistake as it leads to unrealistic results in the game.

[Pascal_slith]

Andrew, could you elaborate on your comment about supply output from refineries and unrealistic results?

[inqistor]

ORIGINAL: Pascal
AvGas was never separately modeled in WitP. The original intent was not to turn WitP into 'Quartermaster in the Pacific', though some of us would have wanted a more complex system as an option (whether considering economic inputs or war material outputs).

Indeed, however planes actually use supply, which could indicate, that in-fact, this represents AVGAS. However, in most cases, all supply usage can be explained, as ammunition use. That brings several points during economy modelling:
1) AVGAS is deducted directly from raw materials production, so some of the oilfields output should be decreased by around 20%, according to picture above
2) AVGAS is deducted from refinery output, so they need historical amount of oil, but produce 20% less fuel
3) AVGAS is deducted from industry output, so HI requires fuel, but produces less output, that it gets input (this actually happens in-game currently)

Point is, that it seems, that IRL AVGAS production, should probably dissapear in-game (but raw materials for it, should still be transported), as it is not represented, as commodity, and its use seems to not be simulated either.
So, in the case of picture above, we can cut output by 20 (or even 30%, when including gasoline)

ORIGINAL: Buck Beach
I am not talking RL or WITP. I wish to know if I go to the Device section in the Editor and reduce the Fuel In for HI to zero will this still produce an HI output using only the Resources IN (even without any Fuel IN)?[&:]

That is, what I am (indirectly) talking about. In previous version there was different input (and also output, because IIRC HI also produced fuel), so probably you can safely change that. But remember, that theoretical model represent lots of things, not only raw material supply.

ORIGINAL: Andrew Brown
PS: These comments exclude the avgas issue. As I have commented elsewhere, I added a supply output to refineries to represent avgas production, but I now think that was a mistake as it leads to unrealistic results in the game.

Well, it could also represent car gasoline, which usage is actually represented, during automatic supply movement. It seems to be sometimes less, than 10% of output, but it is in the margin of error.

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: Pascal
Andrew, could you elaborate on your comment about supply output from refineries and unrealistic results?

Can't speak directly for Andrew, but think what he is refering to is the ability of both the DEI and Burma to produce enough supply from their refineries to be effectively self-sustaining regions. Both areas can support large numbers of troops without requiring any infusions of supply from eslewhere.

Refineries don't make anything beyond POLs, so having them produce supply might be a misnomer. However, since some aspects of "supply" also represent certain types of POLs, it made sense in the beginning, conceptually, to have a small proportion of "supply" be an output. However, this led to the Fortress Java and Fortress Burma thingys. This is Treespider's conclusion and I agree with it.

[treespider]

ORIGINAL: Pascal

Andrew, could you elaborate on your comment about supply output from refineries and unrealistic results?

I believe he is refering to the ability of a place like Palembang to generate "Supply" which can then be used to "feed" units.

In Treespider Mod I removed supply production from refineries.

[vettim89]

ORIGINAL: Andrew Brown

ORIGINAL: witpqs

I see what you mean, but I think that Fuel in AE is like Supply in AE, insofar as it is a group of things rather than just one very specific commodity.

It does represent a lot of things. To me at least. In general, what "fuel" represents is in the following two broad categories:
[ol]
[*]Heavy fuel oil used by ships.
[*]Every other thing - civilian, military and industrial - that products output by refineries were used for.
[/ol]
Some examples of the second part would include: petrol used by the civilian economy and the military (motorised transport etc.);all lubricants; all fuel used for heating etc. Basically, the way that "fuel" is represented in AE is in a "big picture" kind of way. Since the levers we have in AE to represent the economy are very few, and very crude, I chose to think of fuel in a general sense - what a country needs to import in total for ALL of its (non-shipping) needs - NOT in a narrow sense (as in - how much "fuel" is directly consumed by heavy industry itself).

In other words, look at, say, Japan. Look at how much refined oil products it imported in real life. Look at how much of that was heavy ship fuel. ALL of the other refined products still needed to be imported, so that need is represented in-game by giving HI centres a fuel requirement. Why HI? Because, in my view, the "fuel" requirements of an economy were proportional to how industrialised that economy was, and this "industrialisation" is most directly proportional to how many HI centres each country gets. Countries with large populations but which are less industrialised, such as China and the DEI, have much less HI, so needed a lot less fuel as inputs into their economies.

I hope that explains why HI has a fuel input in AE.

Andrew

PS: These comments exclude the avgas issue. As I have commented elsewhere, I added a supply output to refineries to represent avgas production, but I now think that was a mistake as it leads to unrealistic results in the game.

The more I thought about this, the more I had come to this same conclusion. AE works in big picture mode as far as economic inputs/outputs go; trying to make it perform in a level of granularity beyond what the original model allowed is likely going to mean DOOM! I would add one caveat. I think either refinery efficiency should be toned down (Andrews 10 oil in 6 fuel out model) or the amount of refineries in the SRA should be 60% of the RL amount to represent Japan's inability to run those refineries efficiently. I think I like the second better than the first as it does two things. First it still allows Japan's HI refineries to produce at efficient levels and second (this one's for you JWE) Japan would then have to move OIL from the SRA back to Japan.

[JWE]

That's a reasonable approach. I hesitated to do any of that because I really don't know what I'm doing and I didn't want to screw up Andrew's model.

But yeah, here's some numbers. They are probably different from numbers other people have, but they all come from the same source, so they are ok relatively, if not absolutely. Calcs done using 7.7 bbls/ton.

Japan Refinery capacity, 1941 (from a range of sources, min to max)
~ 70 - 90,000 bbls/day in 28 refinery complexes
--> 25,550,000 – 32,850,000 bbls annually
--> 3,320,000 – 4,266,000 tons annually

DEI Well and Refinery capacity, 1940
8,000,000 tons oil field output in 1940 (DEI)
61,600,000 bbls oil field output in 1940 (DEI)
6,300,000 tons refinery output in 1940 (DEI)
48,510,000 bbls refinery output in 1940 (DEI)
1,000,000 tons oil field output in 1940 (Br.Borneo)
7,700,000 bbls oil field output in 1940 (Br.Borneo)
900,000 tons refinery output in 1940 (Br.Borneo)
6,930,000 bbls refinery output in 1940 (Br.Borneo)

So the SRA had 7.2M tons of refinery capacity vs Japan's 4.3M tons. But, Japan got the oil fields producing at near pre-war levels, but refinery efficiency bit the mighty wazoo. In 1943 the Dutch refineries (in Borneo/Java?Sumatra) were operating (peak opperational efficiency) at between 30% to 50% of pre-war levels. Japan spent most of its repair resources on the biggie at Lutong/Miri, which peaked out at an effective capacity of 12,000 bbls per day in 1943. That’s 4,380,000 bbls compared to 6,930,000 bbls pre-war (63%).

So, yes, in a perfect system, I would rape the refineries outside Japan. But Andrew has calculated fuel production and consumption pretty well. Cutting fuel production totals would probably cause comsumption to push things off the cliff way earlier than expected. It's a hard one to figure out.

[JWE]

Setting capturable refineries to 40-50-60% of game values does make a certain amount of sense. Japan has a game refinery capacity of about 900 points (1030 with Korea and China); the DEI has a game refinery capacity of about 1950 points. So that’s about right; currently the DEI has roughly 2x Japan’s refinery capacity.

One problem is dealing with the Allied ability to blow things up. That shouldn’t be too bad since it doesn’t take an inordinate amount of time to rebuild/repair them, and they would rebuild/repair to IRL levels (40-50-60& of pre-war IRL levels).

Other problem (and it’s the real biggie), is that nobody really knows what the long-term fuel utilization is (should be) and therefore, what the fuel production targets should be (long-term, month by month, year by year) except perhaps Andrew. So, what exactly would happen, in game terms, if Japanese fuel production were cut by 33%? That’s what would happen if the DEI refinery capacity (2/3 of totals) was cut to/by 50%.

Is this total fuel production metric sufficient for, at least, nominal consumption, operations, expansions? The necessary min is the amount required to fuel HI. Transporting that stuff requires a ship-gas-tank delta, and there has to be some excess that allows for naval operations. Woof !!!!!

It’s a ton load of bitches
Brewed up by ten witches
With tight naughty britches
Along roadside ditches
That make great big glitches
Or other sad hitches
In vast unknown niches
For poop without riches
Like minor-league pitches
Requiring stitches.

Ciao. J

[Bradley7735]

ORIGINAL: JWE

Setting capturable refineries to 40-50-60% of game values does make a certain amount of sense. Japan has a game refinery capacity of about 900 points (1030 with Korea and China); the DEI has a game refinery capacity of about 1950 points. So that’s about right; currently the DEI has roughly 2x Japan’s refinery capacity.

One problem is dealing with the Allied ability to blow things up. That shouldn’t be too bad since it doesn’t take an inordinate amount of time to rebuild/repair them, and they would rebuild/repair to IRL levels (40-50-60& of pre-war IRL levels).

Other problem (and it’s the real biggie), is that nobody really knows what the long-term fuel utilization is (should be) and therefore, what the fuel production targets should be (long-term, month by month, year by year) except perhaps Andrew. So, what exactly would happen, in game terms, if Japanese fuel production were cut by 33%? That’s what would happen if the DEI refinery capacity (2/3 of totals) was cut to/by 50%.

Is this total fuel production metric sufficient for, at least, nominal consumption, operations, expansions? The necessary min is the amount required to fuel HI. Transporting that stuff requires a ship-gas-tank delta, and there has to be some excess that allows for naval operations. Woof !!!!!

It’s a ton load of bitches
Brewed up by ten witches
With tight naughty britches
Along roadside ditches
That make great big glitches
Or other sad hitches
In vast unknown niches
For poop without riches
Like minor-league pitches
Requiring stitches.

Ciao. J

Here's an option that could be considered safe. Lets say you reduce refinery capacity in the DEI by 700 devices. Just increase Home Island refinery capacity by 700 devices.

There are drawbacks and benefits to my suggestion. But, it eliminates the unknown issue of whether there would be too little fuel as the game progresses.

drawbacks: more than historical refinery capacity in the HI. 700 devices now can be used for strategic points (more than stock)
Benefits: Japan has to ship oil a lot more. Japan has to ship fuel more (less in the DEI, more in the HI.) Japan has to use fuel to ship oil and fuel.

Anyway, it's a thought.