.oil
Is .oil a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.oil is contested: 2 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. They are XYZ Registry and Evolving Petroleum Holdings.
A clear industry word, but oil companies live on .com; expect modest, price-driven registrations and a thin resale market.
oil and gas service firms, commodity traders, and consumer oil brands (cooking, essential, CBD, motor) wanting a short descriptive address
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
The same bet almost exactly: a bare industry-sector noun that no single firm can own as an identity, so its value depends on becoming the shared namespace a whole capital-heavy B2B sector registers into.
Also a generic energy-sector category word whose registrants would be the industry's own installers, suppliers and producers, but it points at a young consumer-facing growth trade rather than a legacy commodity bloc of majors.
A one-word vertical covering a consolidated, regulated, high-value industry where the plausible registrants are incumbent corporations rather than retail buyers, so the string's worth rests on the sector adopting it institutionally.
What a .oil domain is
.oil is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Commerce category. 2 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .oil domain extension real yet?
.oil is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .oil domain?
You can’t yet. A .oil name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .oil was .energy, delegated on 1 November 2014.
Is .oil a real TLD?
Not yet. .oil is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .oil is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
“EPH2629T-T64575 · Evolving Petroleum Holdings · primary · contention set 2026-169 XL2625T-T35153 · XYZ.COM LLC · primary · contention set 2026-169”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49 (usable but limited). The string is a plain, globally understood industry and product word with several real buyer groups: upstream and oilfield-services firms, commodity and trading desks, and consumer oil products (cooking, essential, CBD, motor oil). By analogy (flagged as analogy), existing sector TLDs such as .energy and .solar found steady but modest uptake: registrations happen and some small firms use them as a primary identity, but incumbents in the sector overwhelmingly keep .com and the aftermarket for those strings has been thin. The oil and gas industry is conservative in branding, capital-intensive, and dominated by large players with no reason to move identity off .com, so .oil is unlikely to become a category standard (the band above, 70-89) within 5 years; it also does not reach 50-69 because adoption would need explaining and sustained primary-identity use is not evidenced by analogous sector strings. It is not in the 10-29 band because 'oil' is a serious commercial word with recurring demand across multiple industries, not a joke or event-driven term; defensive registrations from energy companies plus descriptive buys from consumer oil brands should give it volume beyond a vanity TLD. Two applications are on the record, from Evolving Petroleum Holdings and from XYZ (XYZ.COM LLC), both standard-type and in contention set 2026-169; the latter is an existing registry operator, which informs adoption likelihood only in that registrar distribution is plausible. Registration counts, pricing, and launch policy are unknown. Main market uncertainty: whether demand comes mainly from the conservative petroleum sector (low primary-identity use, mostly defensive) or from consumer oil product brands (more willing to use a descriptive new TLD as a primary identity), which would shift the score within the band.