Plants for oil production, processing and transport are made from materials, which, due to the influence of the environment, are subject to destruction by corrosion process. The damages that occurs on the plants represents substantial losses in the economy of a given country. Because of the large, direct and indirect damages from devastating corrosion effects, oil plants need to be protected. Untimely and inadequate protection leads to plant damage, high costs of maintenance and replacement, and in the case of rupture, oil spills can occur, causing danger to people's lives and environmental pollution.In the case of reducing metal decay due to corrosion, different protection measures are applied, and one of the most important measures for the protection in the oil industry is application of corrosion inhibitors. The aim of this paper was, through literature review, to describe utilization of corrosion inhibitors in the oil industry as the most efficient and economically acceptable way of protection. Inhibitors are used during the production process, crude oil separation, transport and storage. The most commonly used inhibitors are aliphatic imidazoline, amine and quaternary ammonium salts which slow down the corrosive activity of hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide gas as the most common corrosive components. Despite their effectiveness in corrosion inhibition, efforts are made to restrict their use because of toxicity. Therefore, more recently, there has been an increasing interest in the use of natural compounds having inhibitory properties in the order to reduce adverse effects on the environment. Of the natural compounds, good inhibitory properties have plant extracts that contain a large number of organic compounds, such as phenols, cinnamaldehydes, unsaturated fatty acids, pyrroles, etc.