If you want to work in "the world of atoms" that Peter Thiel likes to refer to, there is a lot of money to be made in dealing with corrosion. In the US, it eats away 200-300 billion every year.
Totally — there’s a NACE report [0] that estimates the cost of corrosion damage and mitigation at 3+% of the global GDP (in 2013 anyway), which is nuts to me.
Keep in mind the IMPACT report is the cost, not the amount spent on fixes. It's still pretty significant though. There's some internal discussion on updating the report but the arguments over spend vs cost are raging.
Oxygen is an extremely nasty, extremely corrosive, extremely toxic gas. It's just that life has evolved to use it, and engineering has evolved to deal with it. Think of how dangerous forest fire is. You have billion dollar companies who's main product (paint) is to prevent the damage from oxygen (PPG, Sherwin-Williams). Walk into any workshop, and the most thing is going to be the oxygen cylinder.