The groundbreaking discovery was done in the lab, and so it can't be said for certain to be scalable to the global petroleum products industry. If it could, though, it would dramatically reduce the cost and emissions from producing gasoline, diesel, or plastics.

Crude oil and its refined derivates are direct manufacturing inputs for thousands of common, high and low order goods—a fact widely circulated in the aftermath of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world's crude is moved.

Researchers in northern China's Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics have pioneered a method for turning crude oil into refined petroleum called "molecular refining," which uses a chemical membrane to separate the different molecules found in crude oil and shunts them into different containers.