Talk:Dwarf/@comment-5105419-20160905090511/@comment-45.56.46.26-20180808165804

Besides, they run their stuff off of heat-stones which apparently don't consume oxygen when being converted to heat. The whole point of steam-power is to keep the steam enclosed in pipes and piston-cylinders  as much as possible, you have the live steam pipes carrying super-heated high-pressure steam away from your heating unit, the piston-cylinders (or turbines, but that's not really steam-punk anymore), then the low-pressure expended steam is piped back to the heat source to be reheated.

So as long as you eliminate the problem of needing open flames to heat the steam in the first place, there is no special ventilation problem with using steam power. The main issue would be that the dwarves are using the heat to smelt ore, which is an energy intensive business. So they can use the waste heat from that to get hot water, but large scale steam power would require a massive increase in their heat-stone mining.