Wormholes

Depends on your BPO and what state of research it has had.

Before Crius, hauling all of the mats in to produce fuel blocks is less efficient than hauling in the fuel blocks themselves. After Crius, this changes.


This, mostly.

We can't tell you, partly because output on planets is neither consistent over time, nor consistent system to system. It depends on many factors that are more appropriate to discuss in other forums than this one.

Look at your blueprints, see what you need of each mat. Calculate the cost of acquiring each of the materials and how much you could make by selling the materials, both of those depending on your patience (Jita Sell price vs Jita Buy price). That is how much each of those materials are worth. To be safe, lowball your estimates: use Jita Sell to acquire product and Jita Buy to sell product. Isotopes will be your largest expense and most hauling-intensive aspect of the process, though their volume is dropping by one-third when Crius comes.

Experimentally determine your planetary output over the course of a couple of weeks; use your actual system and not estimates from hisec or lowsec, since PI in W-space is better than both of those. Reduce your numbers by at least 25% to account for non-optimal extraction and shared resources. Reduce by a higher percentage if a number of people will be sharing the planets.

This will give you your cost to manufacture the fuel blocks.
First, compare that to the price for buying them to determine if it's worth it to manufacture them in the first place.

Then experimentally determine the same numbers as above using other, more profitable PI products if you see any. You can make your own spreadsheet to determine this, or use any of the numerous ones out there that Google knows about.

Compare the effective ISK/hr from the PI mats to the effective ISK/hr of whatever other mats you would produce. You can then make your decision based on those numbers and the cost of the fuel blocks on the market.

(This process applies to just about all research and industry)

Thanks for the answers so far. I will eventually make a spreadsheet and see the difference over time. I just wanted to know if the idea of making our own fuel is generally a "better" idea rather than selling tier 2+ PI materials to the market.

I'm not really into industry yet but after seing the comments above and a quick research, it looks like you can improve BPO resulting in increase of material and production efficiency?

Removed a flame post.

Don't waste your time on activities you do not enjoy.
Let the poor high guys and null bears work for you and have fun,
e.g. kill them while they work for you.
You are a w-dude and saving a few 100 mils a month is not worth your time.

There is simple rule in EvE which applies to this situation too. "If you can't make it for profit you should not be making it at all."

We split our across 5 peeps. One per ''ingredient'' per se. It cuts down on excessive trips to POCO especially in a high traffic WH. Any excess we sell to the Allaince guys within the WH itself.

PI is nice passive income in WHs and a lot people do it.
It is something you can do when nothing else is going on
in your WH. You haul your products out once per month
and be done with it. There is nothing wrong with it.

It is just that the financial gain from producing fuel might not be worth it:

Are there some HS groups that produce fuel for abyssal profit margins?
Are there more valuable PI-Products to produce than those required for fuel production?
What does your corp lose from you being in HS mining ICE/checking markets/hauling stuff?

We had a guy producing fuel for us and he was useless for the corp:
We lost a couple of fights because he was not available,
we lost isk because we didn't have the numbers to run C5 sites in an efficient manner,
we missed opportunities because he was not out there probing.

I told him **** that, move your ass in our WH now! We did not recruit you as an industrialist.

But who am I to tell you how to run your corp. People enjoy doing different stuff.
Some even mine in w-space.

Just sharing my 2cents.

Thank you for your answer. That was actually the kind of answer I was looking for . Guess I will just continue to buy blocks at the market and sell the PI.