You have a small chance of aluminum using the TE pulverizing machine on bauxite.
Aluminum can be smelted in the regular railcraft blast furnace, which is a lot easier to use than the industrial blast furnace. Also a lot cheaper to build. You want to wait to build the industrial blast furnace until you have some titanium dust and can make all advanced? (middle one) casings. I think building all the middle tier casing is the best first industrial blast furnace.
I am really liking the new gregtech generators though. Specifically the gas turbine.
Your first priority in greg tech should be the industrial elextrolyzer. It is relatively cheap, but you need an MFE to power it and to have enough storage to actually complete work.
I was using a tree farm -> charcoal in regular generators to get by, but then you start to need tons of rubber for IC2/gregtech machines. So i switched my tree farm, which is just a forestry logger to rubber trees and experimented with using the rubber wood as fuel. The rubberwood works really well with an industrial centrifuge -> gas turbine.
Send some rubber wood + 12 cells to an industrial centrifuge and you get 4 methane cells that burn for 45k EU each in the turbine at 16 EU/t and return the cell. I don't know what to do with the carbon cells, so I just send it to the extractor and get the cells back. So you get all your cells back and just need to supply wood. I can't find the centrifuge time, but you can keep at least 3 turbines going with one centrifuge (that is what i have built so far). I would not be surprised if the burn time of the methane cell and the centrifuge time are equal, so you could keep ~4 gas turbines going per centrifuge.
That is 64 EU/t and the gas turbines store 1m EU, which is great for the annoying industrial centrifuges that only need 5 EU/t, but may need it consistently for 40 minutes. Rubber wood also gives 8 resin, which you should know what to do with. I haven't looked at RP2 pipes yet, but you can automate with buildcraft pipes using basically every side of the centrifuge (top center/wood input, bottom empty cell input, 1 side all 4 outputs).
To get gas turbines or aluminum on the cheap. Build an MFE and use whatever basic generators you have/like to store up 256k EU. Build the industrial electrolizer and process your bauxite dust (12 dust + 8 cans). From the output I convert the air cans back to empty cells and centrifuge every 4 water cells to get 3 empty back and some fancy fusion fuel i may want way down the road.
On the logger, it is a very good use of diamonds even without the arboretum yet. You can spam saplings in a 10x10 area around a forestry logger. A hobbyist steam engine will run for hours on one stack of charcoal and is plenty to power the logger. Loggers automatically output to pipes (top sapling, side wood), so it is super easy to sort. Every hour or two i'll grab some saplings and spam them around the logger.
Edit:
Forgot to mention make your MFE's out of rubbies -- they should be more common than diamonds... i know i have about a 3 rubbies for each diamond in my storage.
