Oil Refinery

The Oil Refinery is a mid-game industrial building that converts Crude Oil into Petroleum. Petroleum is a key refined resource used to fuel Petroleum Generators, feed Polymer Presses for Plastic production, and serve as an ingredient in Molecular Forge recipes for Super Coolant. In practice, the refinery is the bridge between raw oil extraction and the petroleum-based power and plastic economy.

An important aspect of the Oil Refinery is that it is not just a refinery, but also a useful heat-management tool. Its conversion inefficiency makes it a strong heat sink, so running hot Crude Oil through it can remove a meaningful amount of heat from the input. Around 40°C Crude Oil is enough for the refinery to end up net heat negative, while 50°C input erases about 20% of the input’s heat in absolute terms. At 75°C, the heat removed rises further, but the efficiency benefit does not continue to improve in any practical way beyond that temperature. This makes Crude Oil a convenient coolant-like medium when a colony wants to both process oil and move heat out of a system.

The refinery’s output ratios make it central to petroleum-based scaling:

• One Oil Refinery can supply up to 6 Polymer Presses.
• One Petroleum Generator’s fuel use is equivalent to about 2.5 Polymer Presses.
• The by-product Natural Gas from one Oil Refinery is enough to keep one Natural Gas Generator running continuously.

That Natural Gas by-product is especially valuable because it helps offset the refinery’s power cost. With the necessary pumps and any required gas filtering included, the refinery can recoup roughly 74–80% of the system’s nominal energy demand without using Petroleum Generators at all. This makes it possible to build a surprisingly efficient refinery loop if the gas is captured and burned instead of vented.

A few practical notes follow from this:

• If the goal is Plastic production, an Oil Refinery can support a large Polymer Press setup from a single processing line.
• If the goal is power, the refinery’s Petroleum output can be turned into generator fuel, but its Natural Gas by-product should not be ignored.
• If the goal is cooling, feeding the refinery warm Crude Oil is beneficial because it can act as a deliberate heat sink rather than a simple manufacturing step.
• Because Petroleum can only be produced by refining Crude Oil, access to oil processing is a hard gate for all downstream petroleum industries.