It has been 3 years since steam cracking was added, but how to automate it is a difficult problem.
Because in the case of only GT, steam cannot be stored. Therefore, all steam must be produced by the boiler when in use. That’s the problem. The steam cracker consumes 1000L of steam for each processing and needs 1024HU of energy. For example, if you use a steel steam cracker with an input of 64HU/t, the steam input you need is 1000 / (1024/64) = 62.5L/t. The problem is that there is no boiler that can just produce so much steam. The closest one is 64L/t, so there will be more steam after each processing, and then more and more steam will remain in the boiler, which will eventually lead to explosion.
A feasible solution is to add a pressure valve to discharge the excess 24L steam, but it will waste steam. Alternatively, you can use a smaller boiler to produce less steam, but this will lead to not enough steam after one work, resulting in intermittent processing.
Or, another crazy solution is to use a set of boiler combination: dense titanium / netherite boiler (896L/t) + steel boiler (64L/t) + bismuth boiler (40L/t) = 1000L/t, and use the input of two tungsten carbide steam crackers 4096HU/ t for three times to overclocking the effect of 1t procress each time. Although the effect of steam is just right, However, bismuth has only a solid burning box, which is very inconvenient to stop automatically, lag and pipeline steam flow may also lead to overpressure,and no one needs to produce plastics on such a large scale in terms of the current GT6.
If you need plastics on large scale, you can hydrogen-crack petrol, fuel or even ethanol. Much easier to automate.
Well, let me explain why I don’t use catalytic cracking:
- The oil field I found is light oil, which means that more gas will be produced instead of fuel oil,I used all the oil for diesel engines.
- The catalytic cracker needs zeolite. Although I have found a zeolite vein, I am reluctant to mine it, because zeolite seems to have no other use except catalytic cracking. I don’t want to useless things and occupy my chest.
- The recipe of catalytic cracking is too unrealistic. As I mentioned in other posts, hydrocracking should produce saturated compounds instead of unsaturated compounds, This is one of the reasons why I have always wanted to change (especially recently cracked ethanol, I don’t understand what’s going on, because all the information I found shows that ethanol will not react with hydrogen. In addition, even if it may react, ethanol itself is a saturated compound, and it can’t be converted into olefins by hydrogenation), I think it may be changed in the future.
The current situation is a bit embarrassing: the ethylene and propylene I obtained by cracking propane and butane have made me 2000 + plastic. Gt6 doesn’t consume plastic as crazy as gt5u, so these plastics can be used to end the game. However, because I have 2000 + titanium tetrachloride left in these plastics, and these titanium tetrachloride are certainly not enough to turn into titanium, so it’s very embarrassing.
I know you dont wanna waste time and all that, but mining like a dozen Ore Blocks is not THAT time consuming, especially if you are standing there in front of it already.
But zeolite seems to have no other use except catalytic cracker. You certainly don’t want to electrolyze it. If you dig too much, it will completely occupy the space of the chest.In addition, it is really a problem for players who are unlucky and can’t find zeolite all the time.
I distilled light oil, which means there will be more propane and butane. I took all the fuel to the diesel engine, but I don’t have a gas turbine and gt6 doesn’t have LPG.
I’ve said many times about the unreasonable recipes of hydrocracking (I know you’ve been tired of it), but it seems that it hasn’t been improved. And I still don’t know what’s going on with cracking ethanol. Where did you see it? All the information I found shows that ethanol will not react with hydrogen. Do you confuse ethanol dehydration to ethylene with catalytic cracking?(it may be a matter of terminology? In fact, it’s a dehydration elimination reaction rather than a reaction that uses hydrogen to break the carbon chain at high temperature and Catalysis)
It is strange that even the recipe of gt6u cracking tower does not have zeolite. In addition, although they added different hydrocracking recipes to the cracking tower, they did not change the recipe of the single block cracker.
Why steam is a problem? IRL industry wastes lots of shit.
I also had the problem of large quantities & varieties of stuff that doesn’t seem to be useful. In the end for everything that I thought not worth the effort storing them I just threw them into cacti. 
Turns out to be much less time consuming than constantly making new chests. Anyway, I don’t think “lack of use” should be too big a problem.
Also talking about realism, zeolite is used as catalyst in catalytic cracking IRL isn’t it? I think having it as an ingredient in the catalytic cracker recipe is nice.