This paper examines how oil exploration and the prospect of future oil wealth have been operating in the colonial space of Turkey’s Kurdistan. By analyzing the uneven material and symbolic transformation of the region following the discovery of oil in 1946 in today’s Batman province along with contemporary contestations and stories around oil and oil futures in Batman, Siirt, and Diyarbakir’s oil geographies, I examine how different generations and actors in Kurdistan have appropriated or unsettled the modern, sovereign, prosperous, or developmental futures that oil exploration and extraction have generated in Turkey. While the Turkish state not only strengthened its claims of legitimacy and sovereignty in Kurdistan through the prospect of oil and geological surveys following World War II, oil also created material networks of connectivity and mediation that paradoxically fueled class-based-critiques of political economy and the idea of Kurdistan for a generation of Kurds. The infrastructures of oil that were originally intended for oil extraction worked to fuel a generation of politicized Kurds who actively challenged the Turkish state’s project of national sovereignty and colonialism. In the meantime, as I demonstrate, the extraction, transportation, and consumption of petroleum have continued to compose visible and invisible mechanisms of dispossession and violence in the region, often shadowed by the sovereign and prosperous futures that oil’s prospect generate. I conclude the paper by suggesting possible modes of action and imagination that challenge oil’s carbon-saturated futures.