Yes, I know you can refine it. I want to know what else you can do with crude oil that’s fresh from the ground.
Preferably things that have an industrial or commercial use (not including selling it to a refinery).
Depends on what sort of crude oil you have to hand. Very light crudes burn pretty well, very heavy crude makes excellent (if somewhat stinky) water proofing material.
Probably not very much. Crude oil is really a mixture of a large number of different varieties of liquid hydrocarbon.
Uses for the particular blends that come out of the ground would be relatively few and far between. As I understand it, the main goal of the refining process is to isolate different streams of compounds according to their basic physical properties, each of which would have different uses. Some are good as easily transportable fuels, say for cars and other vehicles. Others are better suited to burning in homes or industrial plants for heat and/or turbine power. Yet other oil hydrocarbons don’t burn well at all, but are good for making lubricants out of, or plastic, or fertilizer. 
Hope that helps at all.
What fertilisers are made from hydrocarbons?
Ammonia fertilizers (or balanced fertilizers containing ammonia) require hydrocarbon feedstocks for their production.
It’s not like you’re going about gleefully spreading hydrocarbons on the fields, but they’re used in the production of the finished fertilizer.
Fertilizers containing ammonia use hydrocarbons to get it. Nitrogen reacts with a hydrocarbon feedstock to form NH[sub]3[/sub]. Most plants actually use natural gas, because it’s cleaner, but some plants use petroleum ether or even some types of crude oil.
Thanks. you learn something every day here. The sad part is I vaguely recall covering this in organic chem, but I forgot it 20 minutes after the final exam.
Tapioca Dextrin: That’s interesting. How often are those kinds of crudes use in the ways you mentioned?
chrisk: I kind of thought so.
These days, unrefined crude isn’t really used for anything, but historically, that’s all we had. The first time oil was refined was 1853 in Poland. The first use of crude that we know about is from Babylon around 4000 BC, where it was used as a waterproof mortar, as well as to waterproof boats. Round about 200 years ago, oil (and gas) were used for heat and light. It was also used in the production of salt; the oil/gas was trapped in salt domes - a happy coincidence for miners in need of a fuel source to evaporate their brine.