Prioritize lubricants and high-value chemicals

Bulk oil can be purchased and stockpiled more readily than specialized lubricants and hydrocarbon chemicals, which are expensive, consumed in smaller but critical quantities, and easy to exhaust. Producing those high-value commodities domestically also offers a plausible peacetime business through sales and exports. A plant at the cited German scale would produce slightly more than half a million barrels a year, so three such plants could add about 1.5 million barrels of petrol. Against a 4.3-million-barrel import gap, that would remove roughly a third of the shortfall imposed on civilian users. The calculation supports selective resilience rather than the unrealistic promise of total fuel autarky.