SPRINGFIELD — Anyone who has driven the back roads of southern and central Illinois is familiar with the sight of the oil pumpjacks that dot the landscape.
Decades ago, it was common to see those machines bobbing up and down like those drinking-bird toys that seem to operate on perpetual motion, pulling up oil from hundreds of feet below the surface to fuel the region’s burgeoning transportation industry.
Today, however, most of those pumpjacks sit idle, either because the oil below has all been pumped out or the cost of pumping what remains underground exceeds what the market would pay.
Now, a new report suggests those pumpjacks — and the inactive oil and gas wells that lie below them — are more than just relics of a bygone industry. They also could be environmental time bombs lurking underground, threatening to expose Illinois taxpayers to more than $1 billion in future clean-up costs.
“The majority of Illinois’s 30,000+ wells are likely producing little to no oil, yet are still not properly plugged, emitting toxic and climate pollutants and threatening air and drinking water relied on by nearby communities,” the report states.
The report is based on research from the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law and the environmental advocacy group ClientEarth USA.
It says the potential liability facing the state may be much larger than officials have acknowledged so far. But it also says the lack of reliable data about the working status of oil and gas wells in the state, coupled with the state’s weak regulatory framework, makes it hard to know the exact size and scope of the threat Illinois faces. Thus, it’s nearly impossible to hold drilling companies accountable for paying the costs themselves.
“The fundamental point is, whatever amount of a problem we’ve got, it’s the industry’s responsibility to deal with it, and that’s what the system is not achieving,” Robert Weinstock, director of Northwestern’s Environmental Advocacy Center and lead author of the report, said in a recent interview.
Oil and gas in Illinois
According to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the history of oil and gas production in Illinois dates back to the 1850s when the first gas wells were drilled near Champaign. But it didn’t become a major factor in the state’s economy until the first half of the 20th century when oil became critical to the modern transportation industry.
Since the 1850s, approximately 155,000 wells have been drilled in Illinois, mainly in the southern half of the state in a geological area known as the Illinois Basin, which stretches across portions of Illinois, Indiana and western Kentucky.
According to data from the Illinois Petroleum Resources Board, a private member-based industry association, production peaked in the early 1940s when it averaged more than 100 million barrels per year. It dropped significantly after the end of World War II.
Production rebounded somewhat in the 1950s and 1960s with the development of new technologies like water flooding and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which enabled drillers to squeeze more oil out of expiring wells. But it has been on a steady decline since then, with production dwindling to just over 7 million barrels in 2024.
Still, according to IDNR, there are more than 23,400 oil and gas production wells operating in Illinois, although the agency identifies most of those as “stripper” wells that produce less than 1.5 barrels per day. The agency also lists 6,535 injection wells that store salt water and other fluids associated with oil and gas production, plus another 1,078 gas storage wells.
According to the Northwestern and ClientEarth report, precise data about production and well activity in Illinois is hard to verify because the state itself does not collect such data. And without accurate data, the report says, it is hard to know how many inactive wells there are in the state and whether they’ve been properly capped or plugged to prevent them from leaking contaminants into the air or nearby water supplies.
“When we tried to look up production data for wells in Illinois, we found there was none, that it wasn’t maintained by IDNR,” Weinstock said. “And the folks at ClientEarth said, ‘Well, you can get production data from the state agency in almost every other state in the country. What’s going on here?’”
He said that realization inspired the research project.
“It was really bringing that national perspective to Illinois and then realizing just how behind Illinois was when it comes to regulating wells at the end of their productive lives,” he said.
Cleanup responsibility
Under Illinois law, the responsibility for plugging oil and gas wells and cleaning up the sites at the end of their productive life rests with well owners and operators. IDNR is the agency assigned to enforce that requirement through regulations.
But the report points out there are numerous ways well operators can avoid that responsibility, and it suggests IDNR has frequently been unable or unwilling to take strong enforcement action.
For example, state law requires wells to be plugged and capped once they become “inactive,” which is defined as not producing any oil or gas for 24 consecutive months. But since the state does not collect production data, it is difficult for state officials to determine whether a well is active or inactive.
In addition, the report notes, permit holders can delay having to plug and cap a well in five-year increments by applying to have it classified as “temporarily abandoned.” That requires the well to meet certain conditions and for a surety bond to be in place, but it also only costs $100 per year instead of the $100,000 that it can cost to permanently seal a single well.
In many cases, the state also requires well permit holders to post a surety bond to cover future remediation costs. In years past, the report notes, IDNR only had authority to require bonds from permit holders who had previously been sanctioned for regulatory violations. But the law was updated in 2025 with passage of Senate Bill 2463, which broadened the requirement to include any new permittees as well as any permittees who have failed to make payments at any time in the preceding five years.
Even with that change, however, the report argues the bonding requirements are still too weak to ensure that future remediation costs will be covered. While the bill increased the bonding amount for a single well to $10,000 instead of $5,000, it says that is still not enough to cover the actual cost of plugging a single well. And the law still allows permit holders to cover multiple wells with a single “blanket bond” at rates that can average as little as $1,000 per well.
Additionally, the report notes, IDNR has authority to order well owners and operators to plug inactive wells and clean up those sites. But it says IDNR has often failed or refused to exercise that authority and has effectively allowed well operators to ignore such orders.
The report states that most people who receive notices of violations “do not willingly comply, that no further steps are taken in most cases, and that few wells are plugged due to notices of violation or follow-on enforcement actions.”
Ultimately, when all other mechanisms to hold well owners and operators responsible for plugging and cleaning up their sites, the responsibility falls back to the state.
According to information on the IDNR website, there are 3,991 wells enrolled in the agency’s Plugging and Restoration Fund, a program that was established in 1991 to plug leaking and abandoned wells. The current fiscal year’s budget provides just over $64.8 million, most of which comes from federal grants.
But the report argues that the actual size of Illinois’ future liability is likely many times that amount because the wells currently enrolled in the program represent only a fraction of the more than 30,000 wells IDNR actively monitors.
IDNR response
In an email statement, officials at IDNR said the issue of orphan and abandoned wells is a national problem, which is why the agency is now focusing on using federal resources to increase the number of wells being capped and plugged.
“The federal dollars come to Illinois through (the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) are critical because they’ve allowed the state to increase the pace at which we plug wells and have allowed us to utilize our state funds in ways we could not before,” IDNR said.
“This is an endeavor that is going to take time, and IDNR is working as fast as it can, prioritizing the most urgent and potentially dangerous wells first,” the agency said.
Recommendations
The report offers several policy recommendations aimed at ensuring the oil and gas producing industry is held responsible for those costs rather than the public.
Those include requiring producers to report more data to IDNR so it can more easily identify inactive or abandoned wells, and calling on IDNR to be more aggressive in enforcing laws that are already on the books.
It also suggests actions that could require legislative changes such as increasing surety bond requirements, repealing laws that allow companies to declare wells “temporarily abandoned” indefinitely, and restricting the ability of companies to transfer permits to other entities that then file for bankruptcy protection to avoid paying cleanup costs.
“If it’s hard to tell precisely what corporate entity should be held responsible, then the question is, who’s going to have to bear those costs?” Weinstock said. “Should it be everyone in the state and the state’s coffers, or should it be the industry that still operates those wells?”
Officials at the Illinois Petroleum Resources Board declined to comment on the report.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.