Oil culture, with its iconic infrastructure and distinctive aesthetics, played a dominant role in the United States over the past several decades, evoking broadly positive associations. However, due to the unfolding climate crisis and recent acknowledgment of the serious threats it poses, public perception of petroleum, its extraction, and the use of its products has become much more complex and ambiguous, as oil’s highly negative impact on the biosphere has been eventually made evident. The proposed chapter analyzes narratives of the declining oil culture, as presented in selected works by Troy Paiva, an American photographer and a self-proclaimed “urban explorer.” I argue that Paiva’s works accurately represent the ongoing change in general attitudes toward oil. By depicting derelict elements of energy-intensive industries (e.g., old cars, gas stoves, shipyards, or military bases found in urban and suburban areas), the photographs in question reflect different, at times contradictory, approaches to the discussed issue: denial and a sense of yearning for the past when the use of petroleum was not called into question, recognition of the climate emergency with a poignant sense of disorientation, and a less pessimistic, nature-oriented perspective focused on a conscious turn to kinship between the Earth’s animate and inanimate organisms. To achieve that, Paiva sets the artifacts of petroleum culture in three different contexts: by carefully aestheticizing them to address and subvert anti-environmental ideas, by exposing their fragility to evoke a sense of loss, and by presenting them as part of the natural environment, thereby emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between nature and the remnants of oil culture. Drawing on the concepts of petromelancholia (LeMenager, Qui Parle 19(2):25–56, 2011), petro-masculinity (Daggett, Millennium J Int Stud 47(1):25–44, 2018), solastalgia (Albrecht, PAN 3:41–55, 2005), and Chthulucene (Haraway, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016), the chapter discusses how Paiva’s photographs capture the moment of transition from oil-driven culture to the post-oil paradigm and how they both illustrate and shape common perceptions of oil.