With the ability to put Energy/Speed upgrades into the Electrolytic Separator, the closed loop is back, despite Hydrogen being an "Energy Carrier"

I've got 20 Gas-Burning Generators hooked up to Electrolytic Separator, Purifier, Crusher, Enricher, Smelter
All with 8x Speed/Energy Upgrades (Purifier has 8x Gas Upgrades)

After kick starting the chain with a piece of redstone, all 20 Gas Gens are now full of Hydrogen and the 4 gas tanks of Oxygen is slowly filling up as I process ores (Using "Dump excess" oxygen)

I found this while trying to find the optimal amount of Generators to Seperators.

Alright, I have disabled the energy use scaling of the separator while maintaining the max energy scaling. Hopefully this solves the issue while maintaining playability.

Ah yes, I was getting ready to comment about the electrolytic separator.
IRL you could sensibly make the electrolytic process more energy efficient by using different materials, or arranging the plates in a different fashion. But, I am more for a semi-real experience. Perhaps capping the max upgrades on the electrolytic separator?

If I may make a suggestion, take a poke at the GC crew's oxy collector. Perhaps they may let you build off their code to speed things along?

You certainly could make the process more efficient, but it's already operating at near-100% efficiency. You can never produce 1mol of hydrogen from water, and then burn the same amount of hydrogen in oxygen, and have the whole process be energy-positive. Basic conservation of energy. If we were to allow increasing the efficiency of electrolysis we would have to lower base efficiency to 10% (or whatever 1/(max multiplier) is).

My apologies. I understand the actual process of electrolysis, but you are correct; You cannot get something from nothing and 20 engines from 1 separator is quite OP.

Well, technically since the Gas Generator draws its ignition from unknown sources, as well as atmospheric oxygen to burn said hydrogen, you're not strictly "creating" energy for free.
The oxygen being used to burn the H in the Gas Gen is adding matter/energy to the equation.

The oxygen being added to burn the H in the gas gen is indistinguishable from the oxygen produced in the electrolysis. If anyone knows of a hydrogen-oxygen compound with smaller bond enthalpy than water, producing that would allow the extraction of energy from the process, but the thermodynamics of the situation must prevent said product (if it exists) from being formed in normal combustion.

My apologies, I wasn't thinking straight. Ignore my previous statement.

You might be able to find an extremely unstable molecule with a smaller enthalpy, but you wouldn't be able to extract any energy from the process. For example, OH (The hydroxide ion with one less electron, theoretically has less energy than water in its bonds) would be extremely difficult to make, and probably take more energy to make than release, so it would be a storage molecule (also it would probably release the energy. Immediately. On your face). In reality, water is just amazing.

Not to detract from the above exchange, but from a gaming perspective I feel the focus should be on "fun" over "realism." I think a healthy believability is great and like that mekanism is not super unrealistic, but honestly many aspects of the mod that are the most enjoyable are also the least realistic. You can't please everyone and exploits will always be found. So long as its not game breaking or ridiculously easy to obtain, I would personally recommend not jeopardizing enjoyability. Just an opinion, take it or leave it. Either way, I absolutely love the new additions to Mek v8 and look forward to whatever comes next.

From my perspective, this may be a necessary consequence to allow for Electrolytic Separators to support the upgrade system. @unpairedbracket, if you would rather maintain the strict zero net power gain functionality, though, I suppose we could disable energy upgrade support for the separator.

As an option, you could scale the Hydrogen output directly to the RF Cost.

This will still allow the upgrades to produce the power as a self-sufficient Electrolytic Seperator, and allow the boost in Oxygen production.

I think the most likely solution to this would be to keep the ratio of energy:water:hydrogen:oxygen constant, and just have the speed upgrades increase the amounts of each used/produced per tick. I don't think a machine like this can sensibly support energy upgrades unless we drop base efficiency by a factor of 10, and I don't feel like many people would be happy with that.

Changing the water:oxygen:hydrogen ratios would also cause complaining. You electrolyse 2 moles of water, you get 2 moles of hydrogen and 1 mole of oxygen out - changing that would be confusing and kind of non-physical. There is a machine in the works that will slowly passively collect gases from the air, in the overworld it will provide a decent source of oxygen

You're the dev's :)

I do like the idea of the passive oxygen collector.

Feel free to close if you need to.