You can definitely use the oil. Get a pump and some redstone engines, then build a refinery.
The easiest power starter is an MFR tree farm. the reason is that you can put charcoal into Steam Engines from Thermal Expansion or Hobbyist Engines from railcraft, or Generators from IC2. And you can run turtles. So you can basically run anything from that point on. Fuel is a little more fun for me, but if you just want a solid starting system that will get you lots of power and will get you MJs, auto mining, and EU, a tree farm is the way to go.
Id also suggest using redpower furnaces to smelt the logs, as its easy to get lots of nikolite and there arent a lot of other uses for it. Make solar panels, batteries, and 5 redpower furnaces. Then you can smelt all the logs and keep up with a big MFR farm pretty easy. Can easily run multiple 36HP boilers from that one farm.
Xycraft soil too... man I miss the Ultimate pack. :/