Oil

Oil is an important resource in GregTech, providing easy access to an energy dense fuel source and the raw material for advanced materials like Ethylene and Polyethylene. Oil Generation is part of chunk spawning, occurring as spouts and underground fields. Looking through NEI for oil byproducts can be difficult given the variety of processing paths.

Power production
Power is the first use most players will put oil towards. It can serve as a primary power generation method starting in LV, and going as far as fusion (LuV) if desired. Oil and oil byproducts are energy dense, and arguably the most readily accessible fuel source for the early game.

Oil Generation
Despite these being the simplest fuels, there are multiple routes of production. The first step is acquiring oil; in LV the best option is to find a BuildCraft oil spout. These generate randomly in the world, and players should be able to find multiple spouts within a 500 block radius. Spouts poke out of the ground and will very obviously be a black fluid, often seen running down the sides of elevated terrain. If an LV Basic Pump is placed over this oil, it can be collected into a tank or pipe, and used in other machines.

Upon reaching MV, players have the option of building the multi-block Oil/Gas/Fluid Drilling Rig. This large structure scales well and can provide oil generation until the end of the pack. The downside of this machine is locating a profitable oil field.

LV Oil Pump Set Up

 * Basic Pump (GregTech)
 * Low Voltage Battery Buffer or Generator
 * 1-2 rechargeable LV batteries (if using Buffer)
 * 1-2 stacks of Mining Pipe
 * Liquid storage - ULV/LV Fluid Tank (GregTech) or Tank (BC Factory) + Dolly, etc.
 * Soft Mallet & Wrench
 * Blocks for a rain shield
 * Chunkloader (or FTB Utilities)

Once a suitable oil spout is located, construct a rain shield overhead to prevent any rain from touching the blocks around the pump and battery buffer/power generator. Place the pump directly over the spout's center column of oil. Pumps cannot mine through blocks. Place Mining Pipes in the "IN" slot of the Pump's GUI. Put the power provider adjacent and wrench it so the output faces the pump. Insert battery into buffer or fuel the generator. Add tank or pipes to the top of the Pump.

If the pump doesn't start or the mining pipe needs to be retracted, hit it with a Soft Mallet. It consumes very little power while running, even a single lithium battery will keep it going for quite a long time. When working correctly, the Pump will automatically deploy Mining Pipes from its inventory. It can take up to five seconds for a section of pipe to emerge or fluid to be collected. If the pump is consuming power but not deploying any pipes or collecting oil, it may be stuck trying to pick up a different fluid. This often happens with water-based spouts; use blocks to isolate the oil, which spawns in a five block cross shape.

Troubleshooting

 * Check that Mining Pipe has been supplied, and not fluid pipes
 * Ensure that the Pump is centered over an oil fluid block.
 * Check the facing of the battery buffer, and that it has a charged battery.
 * Try resetting the Pump with a Soft Mallet
 * LV Pump will only output to the top face; ensure there's a suitable liquid storage or pipe attached.
 * Flowing liquids and gravity blocks may stop a pump from pumping, even if there is still nearby oil.
 * Sometimes moving the pump to a different location above the underground pool can help.
 * Using a higher tier Pump with a bigger area makes it less likely the pump will get stuck.
 * It's easier to find a new spout than try and get every bucket out of each one.
 * Isolate pumps from other fluids, such as water.
 * The pump must be chunkloaded to work if the player is not nearby.

Fuel Production
Equipped with your oil source, it's time to starting making fuel. In LV you can't make diesel yet, so the best option is light fuel. The best route should be using a distillery to turn oil into sulfuric light fuel, then combining it with H2 in a chemical reactor for light fuel. Generally these steps don't use much H2, so an electrolyzer with water will be able to keep up.

Once you reach MV, it's diesel time. Simply making more distilleries to distill oil into sulfuric heavy fuel, and making an MV mixer will boost your power generated by a lot. The ratio is generally 3 LF distilleries to 2 HF distilleries.

From here, you have many options. There are other fuels, like cetane boosted diesel, or high octane gasoline. It seems that at the moment however, diesel is the best fuel that exists. Despite having a lower energy density, the production is so simple and scalable that it blows the others out of the water. Generally the scaling for diesel involves many lower tier parallel distilleries and eventually using a PA for them. You can swap out single block chem reactors for an LCR in HV which makes that step a little simpler as a single LCR is usually more than enough. Tiering up your drilling rig is a huge help, as each tier will 4x the lifespan of your oil vein. This is vital as you progress, as diesel only has a singular downside. This downside being the oil usage. You most likely will not be able to scale diesel with an oil source other than a drilling rig, however these rigs can carry you very far.

The is one main rule when using diesel power, and it is to keep it simple. Diesel benefits from its scalability, something that other fuels lack. Multiblocks like the distillation tower, or alternative distillation routes with crackers generally just slow things down. Avoiding the distillation tower might seem wrong as it is generally so much better than singleblock distilleries, but that is not true with diesel. The math behind it is pretty simple, and intuitive once you understand it. The DT recipe for oil is the same speed as using an MV singleblock, however it gives all byproducts. That said, you only really want light fuel, and heavy fuel, so you can more or less say it is just 2x better than a singleblock. This is awful when you think about it, as two singleblocks will always be a lot cheaper and easier to use than a distillation tower. Especially when diesel setups can use dozens to hundreds of singleblocks. What is easier, 32 HV distilleries, or 16 Distillation towers?

This spreadsheet can help a bit in understanding your setup. It will give you some machine quantities and power output based on how many drilling rigs you want to make.

Material Generation
Compared to power generation, this can get a lot more complex. Here you might actually want to crack your fuels, and use distillation towers to increase yield. The good news is that at least until UV, this setup can be very slow and unoptimized. A simple HV setup will last you a very long time if you understand the basics. Primarily this comes down to cracking routes.

When cracking fuels, you have 2 main options, broken into 3 levels. Hydro cracking with hydrogen, and steam cracking with steam. *Usually* steam cracked fuels are good for material production, while hydrocracked fuels give lots of methane and fluids for power generation. Here it's a good idea to look through the options for each fuel, and pick which you need. However you can get by with simply severly steam cracking LF/HF/Naphtha and throwing them in a distillation tower. Besides some inputs from charcoal distillation, that will cover all your needs for a very long time.