It's better than grinding, and no, I expect you to explore the planet while the first oil well mines find and build on locations for others, once you have enough fuel you leave, and explore other planets, then return using your stargate. If you really want fuel right away, you mine for coal, or make some simple (or complex if you can/want to) biofuel.
I would love to see Pixels not only be currency, but also become the fuel which allowed all the different races to reach the stars. Pixels can be found while passively exploring and not exactly from mining all the time. I think they should only drop from humanoids of advanced technology, or their respected dungeons/towns, or from chests. Low tier planets may have deep caves or temple/tomb dungeons we could find lost relics of power we can use in the ships converter to make pixels. We could even be questing with a low tech village or trading with them to earn artifacts we may convert into fuel... Or raid it all. Players could trade rare items from a low tier planet for Pixels on a high tier planet. A player could choose to strip mine planets, satellites, and asteroids for all the gold/coal and high energy resources and turn them into pixels on the ship, or trade it to a civilization with demand for a bigger profit.
Kinda a new tack here, heh, but another reason I like the ability to build stargates to advance is that it could be a much more sensible reason you need to fight some sort of boss to move to a new sector...perhaps there are super gates that travel between galaxies that you need special ingredients to complete. This is not different in a gameplay sense, but it would be much more reasonable from a lore perspective.
I rather like the idea of a refinery object you can build later that gets dropped on a planet and starts creating fuel... possibly with the side effect of fast/large ones attracting monsters (thus needing to be defended or put in bases with defenses). Granted I am shamelessly stealing this bit from Firefall which has the most entertaining and engaging resource collection feature I've ever played.
Fuel cells, and some kinda craftable unit to create fuel cells in. Then to charge them you just throw tons of combustible things into a furnace. Later upgrade the furnace to allow you to use plutonium and uranium in it to charge fuel cells. and use those to fuel your ship. Fuel cells could then be also found in chests etc. As a random misc loot item.
