The oil refineries require heat to function instead of electricity. You can burn crude oil in fluid heaters, and then use low capacity heat pipes to bring the heat to the oil refineries. It's similar to how nuclear reactors power heat exchangers in vanilla. You will also need to do this for the distillation towers. Later, you get access to advanced distillation towers and oil refineries that run on electricity instead of heat.
Just fyi, you can also burn other oil byproducts in the fluid heaters to get heat. Lubricant and lubricant destilate don't seem to work though.
