My favorite on this topic is The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. It’s a deep dive into the emergence and evolution of the oil industry. Technological innovations, financial developments, political shifts and so on.
I've been finding The Prize surprisingly light on technical details - I'm 1/3 of the way through the book and half way through the chronology of the oil industry and it hasn't even mentioned a distillation column. Does it get more technical?
