Petroleum is fascinating stuff, along with the petrochemical industry. I only learned a tiny bit about it, but what I did learn was pretty amazing. We had a joint venture with Shell Chemical for a while.
Their head of R&D "back in the day" was a PhD chemical engineer with the name of "Jimmy Doolittle", who was famous for something else. They wanted to name their research center after him but couldn't.
I'm told he was brilliant. The guys at Shell was pretty fun, they took me to a baseball game at the Astrodome, 11th wonder of Texas or something. They had some neat tech.