It takes 20s to craft 10 liquid tiberium... which can be consumed in 1.25 seconds in the reactor, or 16 refineries to produce 200 MW. Or for the 4GJ fuel cell, 32 cycles at 20 seconds per cycle. 4GJ / 960 seconds = 4 MW of power. 16MW with a 3x neighbor bonus. Considering all the miners, 300 steam/cycle, refining... it might not be a net loss of energy, but it comes close unless one has a low-energy steam producer. 300 steam/20s in itself is +450 kW at 165C, which can't be reduced with efficiency modules. If one uses 500C steam (e.g. from the reactor), that's around 30 MJ / 20s, or 1.5 MW of power just lost in the steam use.

Use it as a portable energy source, very handy for Space Exploration or Mining Space Industries. A stack of liquid tiberium barrels has over four times the energy of Nuclear Fuel (stack of 1) and can be burned in a tiny building with no water required.