Oil Power Plant (Civ6)/Civilopedia

Petroleum refining technologies improved at the start of the twentieth century, making gasoline, kerosene, and the lower-grade fuel oil available to consumers. Like coal, oil burns hotter than wood, and thus can create steam more efficiently—but even burning oil is an inefficient way to turn the potential energy of oil molecules into electricity. Like coal, burning oil creates hazardous particulate waste in the smoke and releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
Oil used in power plants and industrial turbines is not as heavily refined as the petroleum that powers most internal combustion engines, but it still must be refined from the world's reserves of crude petroleum, which represent a limited and diminishing resource in the early twenty-first century.