The Internet of Things (IoT), which seamlessly interconnects heterogeneous devices with diverse functionalities, is an attractive choice for the large-scale petrochemical industry to develop an integrated system. With the industrial revolution, efforts have mainly been focused on factory automation, transportation security, and surveillance. The IoT plays a major role in factories with its new methods of data management and data collection. However, the IoT is still at an early stage in large-scale petrochemical plants due to the multiple coexisting heterogeneous networks in harsh and complex large-scale industrial networks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the IoT in large-scale petrochemical plants as well as recent activities in communication standards for the IoT in industries. This paper addresses the key enabling middleware approaches, e.g., an industrial intelligent sensing ecosystem (IISE), which allows rapid deployment and integration of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks with advancements in crowdsensing based services. In addition, this survey highlights the research issues of data management in the IoT for large-scale petrochemical plants