Illinois Basin · Serving now
Tank Monitoring in the Illinois Basin
LeaseSight was built for tank monitoring in the Illinois Basin — we're based here, and the first leases we ever served were the ones down the road in southern Illinois, southwestern Indiana, and western Kentucky. If you're running stripper wells across White, Wayne, Gibson, or Henderson County, you already know the math: too many tank batteries, too many miles, and one pumper route that can't be everywhere at once. LeaseSight puts an hourly reading from every tank and wellhead on your phone, so you know what changed before you drive.
The basin
The ground you're working
The Illinois Basin underlies most of southern Illinois, southwestern Indiana, and the coalfield country of western Kentucky, and it's one of the oldest oil provinces in the United States. Commercial production dates to the early 1900s, but the basin's defining stretch came in 1937–1940, when seismic exploration opened the Clay City Consolidated, Louden, Salem Consolidated, New Harmony, and Dale Consolidated fields in quick succession. Salem briefly ranked as the second-largest producing field in the country at its 1940 peak, the same era the Griffin pool kicked off southwestern Indiana's boom and the Birk City pool established McClosky production in Henderson County, Kentucky. All told, the basin has given up roughly four billion barrels.
Nearly everything still pumping here produces from the Mississippian section. Chester-series sandstones — Cypress, Aux Vases, Bethel, Tar Springs, Waltersburg — stack with the oolitic McClosky zones of the Ste. Genevieve Limestone to make up the bulk of the basin's pay, with shallower Pennsylvanian sands and deeper Salem, Ullin, and Devonian carbonates producing in places. Depths are forgiving by any modern standard: most Indiana reservoirs sit between 1,000 and 3,000 feet, and Illinois' most productive zones run 2,500 to 3,500 feet. That geology sets the production character. This is a mature, shallow-decline basin of stripper wells and long-lived waterfloods, where the typical Illinois well averages around a barrel and a half a day — and a lease can stay economic for decades if it's watched closely.
The operators
Who runs these leases
There are no majors left to speak of in the Illinois Basin. Illinois alone counts more than 1,100 registered operators across roughly 23,000 production wells in 40 counties — overwhelmingly small independents and family operations, many of them second- or third-generation, running anywhere from a handful of wells to a few hundred. The same pattern holds in Gibson, Posey, and Pike counties in Indiana and in Henderson, Union, Webster, and Daviess counties in Kentucky: scattered leases, small tank batteries, and oil moved by truck to the purchaser.
Day to day, that production runs on pumpers. A typical route strings together leases across two or three counties — gauging tanks, checking tubing and casing pressures, listening to pumping units, switching tanks ahead of a haul. At stripper rates the margin for error is thin: a stuck pump that goes unnoticed for a week, a full tank the hauler missed, or a saltwater leak can erase a month of a lease's income. Most operators here still manage the way their fathers did — a gauge book, a route sheet, and a lot of windshield time.
Why it fits
What hourly readings change in the Illinois Basin
The Illinois Basin's economics are a monitoring problem in disguise. When your wells make a few barrels a day, you can't afford a company man on every lease — but you also can't afford to find out on Thursday that a well went down Sunday night. LeaseSight's LTE sensors report tank level, tubing and casing pressure, and flow every hour, and push an alert to your phone the moment a threshold is crossed. A tank that quits gaining tells you a well is down before your pumper's next visit. A tank approaching top tells you to call the hauler before you're shut in waiting on a truck. Tubing pressure that falls off overnight points to a hole or a parted rod string while it's still a cheap fix.
That changes how a route works. Instead of driving every lease every day to find out what happened, your pumper starts the morning knowing which batteries gained, which wells look off, and which tanks need a load called — and spends the day on the leases that actually need hands on them. That matters in a basin where leases are strung across county lines and a winter route over gravel and oil-chip roads can eat half a day. LeaseSight runs as one app on your phone and desktop, works alongside the gauging you already do, and because we're based in the Illinois Basin ourselves, support is local — when you call, it's someone who knows what a McClosky well is. And the sensors install in minutes, no technician needed.
Curious what the hardware looks like? Read the LTE sensor and installation deep-dive or the remote monitoring FAQ.
Local support
Based here, not shipping boxes here
The sensors install in minutes yourself — and professional installation is available if you'd rather. Either way, support across Illinois, Indiana, and western Kentucky is local: call or text and you get a person in the basin, not a ticket queue.
or call/text +1 (618) 841-7941