CUMBERLAND COUNTY — There seems to be few people around these days who know much, if anything, about Fireball Production Inc. Not the oil industry leaders. Not the state regulators. Not the residents of this downstate county littered with hundreds of holes in the ground.

They apparently hadn’t heard, or couldn’t remember, that 36 years ago, with global oil prices in a free fall, the oddly named company made an odd business decision: It purchased hundreds of aging wells in a depleted oil field.

The company claimed the wells would be sold for parts and then plugged. But staff at the Illinois Department of Mines and Minerals — then the agency tasked with overseeing oil production — suspected something was amiss with the sale. They asked the state attorney general’s office for help collecting unpaid fees that, by the spring of 1991, had reached $45,500.

“Certainly,” a department attorney wrote to the AG’s office, “there is a sense that this may have been a fraudulent conveyance.”

Neither agency, though, could save Illinois from the far steeper financial burden that lay ahead, or the environmental hazards those abandoned wells would pose.

A four-month Chicago Tribune investigation, drawing on hundreds of pages of previously unreleased public records and interviews with former state officials and oil operators, has revealed the startling ease with which Fireball was able to evade its legal responsibility for plugging wells that have stopped producing, exposing downstate communities to a host of contaminants — above and below ground — while saddling the state with millions in cleanup costs.

In Fireball’s case, state data show, the company ultimately abandoned 603 wells.

Its sudden and short-lived foray into Illinois’ oil business is estimated to cost the state around $24 million.

“This is exactly what we’re talking about in our report,” said Ben Segal, an attorney with the California-based environmental nonprofit ClientEarth USA, which in January released a 41-page study — co-created by the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law — that detailed what its authors called “critical flaws” in the state’s oil regulation that have allowed operators to abandon oil wells.

“I think what happened here is evidence of how important it is for agencies to really scrutinize transfers,” Segal said, “and how important it is for agencies to block transfers when they’re inappropriate, or (to) put conditions on transfers like increased bonding.”

The man identified in state records as Fireball’s president died in 2007, according to public records and his son-in-law.

Fireball’s wells are among the thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells strewn across southern Illinois, remnants of a distant past when the state was one of the nation’s top oil producers.

Many are called “orphans” by the state, their owners dead or unidentified, their companies bankrupted by a notoriously volatile global industry punctuated with booms and busts.

As the Tribune reported in January, years of mismanaged fees and inadequate record keeping have hobbled the state’s efforts to plug orphan wells, which, as of May data from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, reached nearly 3,900 in number.

The agency calculates the cost to plug them is around $155 million.

Fireball, unraveled

Richard Lacey and his brother own close to 50 acres of land in eastern Cumberland County that have been in his family, he said, since the 1850s. Scattered about the fields and trees are 14 abandoned oil wells, each one named after their great-grandfather, L.C. Lacey, who once owned the land.

Most of the wells were drilled between 1948 and 1950; all of them stopped producing long before the brothers bought the property from their aunt about a decade ago.

“It’s really just a nuisance to farm around,” Lacey said.

Though he once worked in the oil industry in Kansas, Lacey said he was unfamiliar with the company that, state records show, last operated the wells before they were abandoned to the state: Fireball Production Inc.

The Tribune spoke with a dozen people who, like Lacey, own land pocked with Fireball’s unplugged wells. Most said they, too, had never heard the company’s name until a reporter asked about it.

Some didn’t even know they had abandoned wells on their property. In several cases, state records show, the wells are practically undetectable to the naked eye, having previously been cut off below ground and capped with a plate — still, the state considers those wells to be unplugged and capable of causing environmental damage, which can include leaking toxic chemicals into groundwater, spitting climate-warming methane gas into the atmosphere and spilling crop-killing fluids onto fertile farmlands.

The few people who were aware of the company’s existence could only repeat stories shared by others. One landowner gave a reporter the name of a man he claimed was “one of the few who is still alive who could answer your questions.” When reached by phone, that man said he would like to help, but he did not want to get involved. A woman could be heard in the background warning a reporter not to pursue this story.

A Google search proved fruitless. The planet’s largest search engine returned one result for Fireball Production Inc.: the PDF list of orphan wells published on the IDNR website.

Department records obtained by the Tribune through Freedom of Information Act requests, though, contained crucial puzzle pieces.

Those records suggest that Fireball did not drill any of the wells it eventually abandoned. Nearly 90% had been first drilled in the 1940s and 1950s, two decades when Illinois was still one of the nation’s top oil-producing states. Several were designed for a tactic meant to reenergize depleted oil reservoirs.

The company that drilled many of them, Forest Oil Corp., was considered a pioneer in the technique, having used it decades earlier at oil fields in its home state of Pennsylvania.

Forest Oil eventually left Illinois for oil fields elsewhere, and a succession of companies took over operating the Cumberland County wells.

By 1986, state records show, a new operator surfaced. Three Star Drilling and Producing Corp. was founded six years earlier and based in Vincennes, Indiana, along the Wabash River opposite the Illinois border.

At one time, Illinois was a top oil producer. Today, that legacy is a $160M problem.

Its president, Ira Michael Patton, told the Tribune he was “fairly new to the business” when he acquired the oil wells, and that he was quickly hit with supplier bills incurred by the previous operator — debts that he said were not disclosed at the time. He also said he later learned that multiple wells he purchased had been originally drilled with the help of an explosive that made plugging them through conventional means difficult.

“If I’d had all the facts, I don’t think I would have bought (them),” he said. “I guess I had access to the knowledge — I didn’t have the knowledge.”

Shortly after Patton’s company purchased the wells, the industry was rocked by plunging oil prices, which fell by 54% in the first half of the year.

Patton said he delegated much of Three Star’s daily operations to his manager while he traveled overseas for work, consulting in Romania and seeking oil rights in Papua New Guinea. Still, as oil prices failed to rebound throughout the remainder of the decade, he said the Illinois operation became “a tremendous loss.”

“I should have shut it down years before I did,” he said. “I just kept putting money into a lean situation until it got impossible.”

The wells his company owned, meanwhile, became liabilities.

‘I would be glad to take a polygraph’

In the Cumberland County government offices’ basement, next to Christmas decorations and voting booth partitions, rows of industrial shelves hold leather-bound books that contain handwritten and, later, typed lists of taxable real estate in the county dating back to the late 1800s.

Oil wells in Illinois are taxed at the county level, similar to real estate. One parcel number, for example, can cover dozens of wells.

Thirty-six parcels owned by Three Star were marked in the 1988 book with a red stamp that read, in all capital letters: FORFEITURE.

The following year’s book showed the same parcels with the same red stamp. But this time, next to the words “back tax,” a dollar amount was typed. In total, Three Star owed the county a little over $28,000 in back taxes on those parcels, an equivalent, when adjusted for inflation, of nearly $75,000 today.

On Dec. 28, 1989, state records show, Three Star transferred ownership of 730 wells to Fireball.

“We assumed that since that field was no longer producing, the economics of that field were very limited,” Lawrence Bengal, the state’s then-supervisor of its oil and gas division, said in a Tribune interview. “So any kind of transfer, even though it was in accordance with all the laws and the bonding we had in place, any operator would have a difficult time rejuvenating that field and making it economic and productive.”

And yet, Bengal said, the state could do nothing to stop the sale.

“That’s the problem: Most oil and gas states have rules that cover transfers,” he said, “but as long as you comply with those rules (and) post the required bond, we don’t look into the viability of the buyer.”

Patton said he empowered Three Star’s manager to sell any of the company’s wells except one in Cumberland County that he thought could prevent water contamination by having been drilled horizontally “like spokes on a wheel in the oil zone.”

But he said his manager, who records show died in 2020, did not tell him about the Fireball sale.

“That would be something I think I would remember, if I heard of Fireball,” he said.

Patton also said he didn’t know that the company’s president, according to state records, was his friend, David Hart. Both Patton and Hart’s son-in-law told the Tribune that Hart was a professional golfer who helped find investors for various companies.

Records from the Nevada secretary of state’s office identify Hart as one of Fireball’s three directors when the company filed articles of incorporation in that state in May 1987.

Another director at the time was a woman who Patton said once worked part time for a chemical company he owned in California.

The third director listed on the records is Patton’s wife, Gayle Patton.

When presented with this information, Patton again said he did not remember the company and did not know it had purchased oil wells from Three Star.

“We did form a few corporations,” he said. “I didn’t know one was Fireball. But I don’t remember ever doing anything with any company called Fireball. I’m just telling you the truth. You asked me. I would — again, I would be glad to take a polygraph.”

Patton’s wife also told the Tribune she could not remember much about the company or why it was created.

“All I remember and know is that we didn’t do anything with Fireball,” she said. “It was like a nothing company.”

Nevada records show that Fireball’s corporate charter was revoked in February 1989 for failing to file the required paperwork and pay the required filing fee. Hart had the charter reinstated in December of that year, days before the Three Star wells were purchased. This time, he listed himself as its president, secretary and treasurer.

The company that ‘does not exist’

In May 1990, five months after Fireball entered the state’s oil industry, regulators sent it a violation notice for unpaid fees on 425 wells: $100 per well, for a total of $42,500.

Hart replied in a typed letter that same month. In it, he called the fees “exhorbitent” and asked for a copy of the state law his company had been accused of violating.

“In regard to our purchase of numerous properties in Cumberland County, Illinois,” he wrote, “our business plan has been to plug a significant amount of the wells for the salvage value as I am aware of several markets for such structural goods.”

Hart told the state he had been “co-venturing” with “Mr. Roy Reidle,” adding, “It would seem to be in everyone’s best interest to let this plan have every attempt to succeed.”

When reached by phone, Riedle (spelled i-e) said he did not know anyone named David Hart and had never heard of Fireball. He owned an oil service business in downstate Clay County, he said, but it went out of business in the 1980s.

Riedle said he had no idea why his name appears in Hart’s letter to the state. “It almost makes me feel criminal, and trust me, I have nothing to do with that thing.”

The state continued to send notices to Hart in the months that followed, each seeking to collect unpaid well fees.

In a letter dated April 29, 1991, Gunnar Gunnarsson, legal counsel for the Department of Mines and Minerals, asked the state attorney general’s office to file suit against Fireball.

The letter stated that while Fireball was a Nevada corporation “currently in good standing” in that state, it “was never authorized to do business” in Illinois. Indeed, the Illinois secretary of state’s office confirmed that Fireball was not registered with the state, a factor that Segal with the nonprofit ClientEarth USA said should be “less than the bare minimum” for oil regulators to consider when approving the sale of oil wells.

In the letter, Gunnarsson identified Hart as Fireball’s president, secretary and treasurer, and Nancy Kasson as its registered agent in Boulder City, Nevada.

Like Riedle, Kasson told the Tribune by phone that she never heard of David Hart or Fireball and had no idea how her name became associated with the company.

Kasson said her father, who ran a tax preparation firm before his death in 2010, did business in the 1980s with Patton’s Three Star. She could not remember the exact nature of their business relationship, but said, “They had a parting of the ways.”

“You know, you’re really racking my brain,” she told a reporter. “I just remember conversations, and not pleasant ones.”

Patton’s name was included in Gunnarsson’s letter to the AG’s office. He wrote that Three Star was still paying off two years’ worth of “very large” fees on the wells it once owned, “and it is our suspicion (though we have no definite proof to this effect) that Three Star unloaded these unproductive wells on an out-of-state corporation to avoid the liability to the State for the fees and plugging costs.”

Patton denied the allegation to the Tribune and reiterated that he was not aware the wells had been sold to Fireball. He said his company plugged wells it drilled and presumed that the portion of annual fees it — and other operators — paid into the state’s well-plugging fund was supposed to be used to plug the wells it owned but did not drill.

“I’m not stupid enough to take on the liability of plugging wells that other people drilled,” he said.

Gunnarsson continued corresponding with the AG’s office. In June of 1991, he gave the office a new address for Hart in Palm Desert, California. “It sounds a little more scenic than Anaheim,” he wrote, referring to the company’s previous California address on file. “Perhaps that is where Mr. Hart is now residing.”

A demand letter sent to that address was returned marked “vacant,” the AG’s office replied.

“I do know that Mr. Hart exists because I spoke over the telephone with him several months ago,” Gunnarsson wrote on July 19, 1991. “I am afraid, however, he was not entirely truthful with me about his or Fireball’s address.”

The next month, Gunnarsson wrote the AG again. Fireball’s wells were many decades old, he said, and had “negligible market value.”

“The bottom line is apparently this: we can get a judgment against Fireball but have no present hope for collecting on it … for now there appears to be no reason to file suit.”

A woman who answered the door at Gunnarsson’s home told a Tribune reporter that he declined to be interviewed for this story.

On Jan. 7, 1993, Illinois DNR officials wrote an internal memorandum to include in Fireball’s “enforcement file.”

In it, they wrote: “Fireball Production, Inc. does not exist.”

‘A cautionary tale’

Despite their previous conclusion, Illinois oil regulators continued, sporadically, over the next 20 years to send Fireball violation notices in an attempt to collect unpaid fees and compel the company to plug its wells. Records reviewed by the Tribune do not show any responses from the company, which, according to Nevada secretary of state records, had its status permanently revoked in 1997.

Illinois cashed a $25,000 bond filed by the company in the event it abandoned its wells, an amount that comes to $42 per well that Fireball orphaned to the state.

On Aug. 26, 2022, Illinois Department of Natural Resources officials announced the agency had been awarded the first of what would ultimately be two, $25 million federal grants to bolster its orphan well-plugging and restoration fund.

One of those grants is just enough to plug only the wells Fireball abandoned, leaving the state — and potentially taxpayers — on the hook for another $130 million in plugging costs, based on the department’s latest tally of abandoned wells.

“The agency falling asleep on this one transfer has essentially wiped out the single largest transfer of money into the (state fund) in the history of the program,” said Segal.

Thirty-six years after Fireball flashed through Illinois, it appears there is little hope of holding it accountable for the oil wells it abandoned.

“Unfortunately, so much time has passed, I’m not sure what enforcement options we have,” said Dan Brennan, IDNR’s Oil and Gas Resource Management division director. “If nothing else, we take it as a cautionary tale to try and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Residents in Cumberland County, meanwhile, continue to wait for the state to clean up the mess Fireball left them.

A little over a year ago, Kyle Stoops bought 16 acres of land a few miles north of Casey. The heavily wooded tract of mature oaks, felled logs and brush offers the perfect terrain for training competition hunting dogs.

Last winter, while walking the property, he found two open well casings, holes in the ground, each around 9 inches in diameter and spaced a foot or so apart. One looks to be shallow, the other plunges deeper than the eye can see.

Both could cause injury to his dogs.

“Wow,” he remembered thinking, “now I’ve got to go back and wedge something in and make sure those get blocked off.”

Stoops said he did not know who had once been responsible for those well casings. They appear, per state DNR records, to have been part of an abandoned Fireball well.