Reprocessing

Refining is a miner’s second best friend, the first being powerful mining lasers. Refining allows a miner to refine their raw ore into usable minerals that can be sold or used for personal production. However, it is unlikely that new players' skill sets will allow for the efficient use of a refinery, and large portions of the refined minerals will be lost as ‘waste’, so new miners may find it more profitable to sell the raw ore they mine rather than refining it.

A pilot's ability to use a refinery is affected by three factors: equipment efficiency, refining skills and the equipment use tax.

Equipment

In New Eden there are two types or refining equipment: equipment owned by NPC corporations and equipment owned by player corporations. For the purposes of this guide we will only examine NPC refineries that can be found in almost all systems of empire space.

If an NPC station is capable of refining then its equipment will have an ‘efficiency’ of either 30% or 50%. Obviously using a station with 50% equipment is better so pilots should take care when choosing a refining station and check this value before use. (You can use third-party map tools like dotlan to quickly check this.)

Now, confusingly, you would think that you would receive 50% of the minerals using this equipment, but actually at this level you actually receive 87.5% of the minerals refined, with 12.5% of the minerals lost as ‘waste’

Pilot Skills

There are two generic skills that affect a player’s ability to refine: Refining and Refinery Efficiency, both of which are available from NPC stations. Refining is the first skill you will need to improve efficiency, and will cost approximately 45,000 ISK. (This cost can be covered by the university's skillbook program.) Each level of Refining will increase the equipment efficiency by 2% for a maximum of 10% increase. Using commonly found 50% empire equipment will now give you an output of 91.25% with 8.75% of the minerals being lost.

Refinery Efficiency has the largest impact on refining efficiency; as such it takes 3 times as long to train as Refining, as well as requiring Refining Level 5 as a prerequisite skill. This skill costs 252,000 ISK. Training Refinery Efficiency to level 3 gives an output of 96.2%. Due to the mechanics of the game, when using an NPC station this is fixed to 95%.

Equipment tax

So far it is has been possible to refine a batch of ore and receive 95% of the minerals. Skills can no longer be used to improve this value. This is because there is a fee for using the equipment, a tax charged by the NPC corporation who own the station. At its default value, this is 5%. It is possible to reduce this value to zero so that a refining will result in 100% of the minerals being given to the player.

In order to reduce the tax level your standing with the NPC corporation that own the station needs to improve, there are already guides available to do this. You need a standing of 6.7 of more to reach zero tax. Faction standing can override corporate standing if it's higher, so having a faction standing of 6.7 -- which is quite difficult to do -- will give you perfect refining at all stations that belong to corporations within that faction.

Within the university there are many players who have already attained this ‘perfect refine' and offer it as a service to newer players: see the Perfect Refine List for more details.

References

Halada's Mining Guide PDF