Hydrogen

> *"The most abundant element in the universe is the lightest gas."*
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## Overview

**Hydrogen** is a versatile and energy-dense liquid. It is also one of the most challenging resources to handle, because during basic refining it can only be produced in conjunction with other materials. If the output backs up, then that will halt the process of the Oil Refinery.

In the early game, Hydrogen is used for Energy Matrix research, but is later converted to other resources including Deuterium. Hydrogen demand drastically increases in later game stages, in which it is mainly obtained via deployment of Orbital Collectors.

## I Need More Hydrogen!

Pre Structure Matrix research there are two main ways to ensure supply with Hydrogen, one being Plasma Refinement, the other being X-Ray Cracking. If the player choses Plasma Refining there will be an Oil excess that has to be dealt with, if the Player choses X-Ray cracking there will be an Hydrogen excess later on. One way to deal with this is to place Storage Tanks, which will store the corresponding resource till demand can catch up. While X-Ray cracking does provide the ideal amount of Energetic Graphite for Energy Matrix production as well, it also consumes the refined Oil itself, which can exhaust Oil Wells. Due to the fact that the refined Oil is later needed in bigger quantities anyways, its far more convenient to store the Refined Oil instead of the Hydrogen, since later Oil production would either add a gigantic Hydrogen surplus or require you to get rid of the Cracking Setup entirely or even the usage of Reforming Refine to counteract this.

Alternatively, you can burn the Refined Oil or the **Hydrogen** from Plasma Refining directly in a Thermal Power Station, which introduces an additional element of instability to your production (like clogging of production or cascade failure of the energy grid) but also helps with energy production early on. Note that burning Refined Oil in a Thermal Power Station will triple your crude oil consumption and exhaust Oil wells rather quickly.

Post Structure Matrix research you can unlock the Orbital Collector, which will be able to provide you with large quantities of Hydrogen, among other valuable resources like Deuterium or Fire Ice.

## I Have Too Much Hydrogen!

First, if you are X-Ray Cracking, stop! That process produces extra Hydrogen and is only for when you have too little Hydrogen. While it also produces Energetic Graphite, it will be easier to get that directly from Coal.

Alternatively, if the oil becomes the more desirable product it is possible to reverse the process and reform the Hydrogen back into Refined Oil with the use of Coal. Note that this approach requires you to later feed additional Hydrogen into the oil production once the stored reserves are depleted.

While production can always be fixed, there are also alternatives:

**Storing** Hydrogen in Storage Tanks. Although this is only a stopgap, each tank has room for 10000 Hydrogen, which lasts a while. Eventually you will need large amounts of Hydrogen for your Gravity Matrix production due to the high Hydrogen demand of Casimir Crystals. Another use for Hydrogen is the conversion into Deuterium to create Strange Matter for Graviton Lenses or a sufficient supply for Deuterium Fuelrod production. Note that Deuterium can also be stored in Storage Tanks, but conversion via Fractionators will result in equal quantity. A niche use for Hydrogen is the production of Hydrogen Fuel Rods.

Another option is ***burning*** it in Thermal Power Stations. This has the advantage of extra Power production and the eventual depletion of hydrogen storages. The issue with this is that the extra power can only be used if there is an excess of Hydrogen, so it poses a threat for Energy Grid stability without external Hydrogen sources to compensate for the eventual depletion of the stored hydrogen, or additional power producers in the grid that can compensate in that case. This method only works if the Hydrogen burning Thermal Stations provide long-term for a sufficient percentage of the total power consumption, matching the energetic value of the excess Hydrogen. So, either build back existing power providing facilities, or overbuild the supply of hydrogen burning Thermal Facilities to alter the ratio.

### Destroying Hydrogen

Using a Fractionator it is possible to destroy hydrogen (see below), however this requires a good setup. The naive approach of 1 Fractionator coupled with 1 Thermal Power Plant does **not** help solve Hydrogen problems: the tooltip of the Deuterium Fractionation recipe is misleading. Instead of reducing Hydrogen to one-hundredth as much Deuterium, each input Hydrogen has a 1% chance of being converted into Deuterium, *and otherwise remains as Hydrogen*. The end result is exactly as much liquid as you started with.

To use Fractionators to get rid of excess Hydrogen, a system that burns the Deuterium produced by the fractionation process is needed. A closed electrical system of 6 Fractionators powered by 2 Thermal Power Stations guarantees that the Fractionators will always be powered only by the Thermal Power Stations. Then two well-placed Splitters, each with an input priority, can be used to prioritize the burning of Deuterium (feeding in excess Hydrogen from the fractionation loop if there is not enough burnable Deuterium to power the Fractionators). This system burns Hydrogen to power the creation of Deuterium, which is then burnt at a significant overall energy loss. A Wind Turbine or Solar Panel may also be added to this isolated power grid to allow the setup to automatically restart if hydrogen runs out for a long time (the power plants eventually run out of hydrogen because of the idle power usage of the Fractionators), however doing so will slightly reduce the amount of hydrogen destroyed by the setup.

One might be tempted to implement the same "energy deficit" idea for hydrogen destruction by setting up 6 Thermal Power Plants paired up with a Miniature Particle Collider producing Deuterium on an isolated power grid. However, this setup eventually gets stuck: the Particle Collider produces more power from its output deuterium than the power plants require to power the particle collider. A particle collider working at full capacity produces 2 Deuterium per second, thus producing 2 \* 9 MJ / 1sec = 18 MW of power via its output deuterium. On the other hand, the 6 thermal power plants, to power the particle collider, would require 12MW/80% = 15MW of power. Of course, the excess deuterium could be used for other purposes, however in that case, there is no need to attempt destroying the hydrogen in the first place; the hydrogen should be used for deuterium production instead.

**Hydrogen Priority**

   The most common cause for Hydrogen related cloggages and perceived excess is a faulty priority in hydrogen priority. This issue usually emerges once Hydrogen Import via Orbita Collectors is present. If a hydrogen producing facility (for example Plasma Refinement or advanced recipe Graphene production) produces Hydrogen and tries to export said Hydrogen via ILS, there is always the chance that an receiving ILS will instead draw its hydrogen supply from an Orbital Collector (this can be disabled in the ILS configurations), or an relay ILS that stores Hydrogen from Orbital Collectors. The most direct and save option is to give surplus Hydrogen from facilities direct Priority via belt, which can be achieved by using a T-Junction, or a splitter. However, this requires the player to build Hydrogen **producers** where there Hydrogen **consumers** are located, else no Belt priority can be given.

## Crafting Recipes

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### Crafting Into

Graphene (Advanced)

212s2
Deuterium Fractionation

0.010.99.017s1
Mass-Energy Storage

222s2
Plasma Refining

124s2
X-Ray Cracking

314s12

### Crafting From

26s110
14s1212
14s8212
224s121211
52.5s10
34s211
16s22