Polymeric materials are more and more solicited for industrial applications which were dominated by metals essentially for strength and durability reasons. However, both resistance to degradation and maintenance issues, forced to introduce high performance polyethylene resins to be used in many aggressive environments. The environmental stress cracking phenomenon occurs when PE is subjected to stresses in the presence of adverse chemical conditions. Parameters such as time-to-failure and longterm brittle-like surface failure of PE pipes present several similarities in relation to environmental stress cracking and slow crack growth. This study presents the first results of the interaction between crude oil (CO) and polyethylene (PE) outer and inner machined pipe layers. It is found that the outer pipe surface absorbs more liquid than the inner surface. The effect of CO reduces the modulus of elasticity by more than 76% after 7 days exposure. While most of the mechanical properties have been negatively affected, it is observed that the breaking stresses increased by 2.5 and 1.6 times respectively for inner and outer layers compared to the as-received case. In addition, it is noted that roughness criterion (Ra) for CO environments increased by ~ 48% for the outer surface and varies little for the inner surface. Such observations are different from previously studies using a toluene-methanol mixture. Structure analysis in terms of cristallinity, oxidation induction time and morphology observations are used to formulate a rationalization for these results and the differences with others solvents.