An Indiana pastor became an Illinois oilman. Spills and pollution followed.
Jonathan Bullington, Adriana Pérez Chicago Tribune
LAWRENCE COUNTY — Tens of thousands of gallons of fluid spilled from the open pit, urged on by heavy spring rains and unencumbered by an emergency pump disabled by a power failure.
The toxic mix of oil and an underground water called brine, several times saltier than the ocean, poured into a ditch along Petrolia Lane and crept toward an unnamed stream.
It then flowed for 3 miles along a serpentine creek, heading east and north en route to the Embarras River. From there, the current of the river known downstate as the “Ambraw” took it toward the Wabash River along the Illinois-Indiana state line.
An Illinois Department of Natural Resources conservation police officer spotted the unmistakable sheen of oil on the Ambraw that morning in March 2024 and alerted local emergency management officials and the state agency.
Some 150 miles southwest at the far southern tip of the state, utility company Illinois American Water was told to be ready to operate an emergency intake on the Ohio River, downstream of the Wabash, as a last resort to prevent the contaminants from polluting the Mississippi River and, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico.
Over the next few days, a network of at least 30 divisions within local, state, tribal and national agencies would be warned about the spill, which, when it was finally halted a little over a mile from the Wabash, totaled 10,500 gallons of oil and another 42,000 gallons of brine.
The day of the spill, however, emergency responders had an equally pressing task: Find its source.
There had been no reports of spills from any oil operators that morning, as state law requires. Quickly, though, regulators had traced the release 15 miles to the open pit near Petrolia Lane and a facility run by a company they were familiar with: Indian Liberty, LLC.
The March spill, which prompted an ongoing civil lawsuit from the Illinois attorney general’s office, was one of at least 11 linked to the Indiana-based company’s roughly 1,400 oil wells and attached flow lines that year, according to hundreds of pages of previously unreleased state records reviewed by the Tribune.
Additionally, court records show, the company racked up more than 1,200 violations from the Illinois DNR since it acquired its wells in 2021 — a number equal to two violations every three days.
“These people have no business with an oil field,” said Aaron Gray, a longtime farmer whose land in Lawrence County was damaged by the company’s spills.
Though most of the company’s wells were transferred to a new operator in April, the 17 that remain under its control appear in danger of becoming wards of the state, faced with an uncertain future as their owner deals with mounting legal woes, debts and a revoked business license in Illinois. That would leave Illinois oil regulators — and by extension, taxpayers — to clean them up.
As of June, there were roughly 3,900 orphan wells scattered throughout the southern half of the state, the Illinois DNR reported. The agency calculates the cost to plug them all, at $40,000 apiece, is around $155 million.
A months-long Chicago Tribune investigation previously revealed how the state has fallen woefully short in its attempts to stop the proliferation of abandoned oil and gas wells through years of mismanaged fees and lax recordkeeping.
The paper’s multipart series exposed how oil operators have been able to easily evade their legal obligations to plug nonproducing wells, ultimately shifting millions of dollars in plugging and restoration costs to taxpayers and exposing communities to a host of environmental hazards, above and below ground.
In Indian Liberty’s case, the company’s minimally producing wells — averaging roughly a tenth of a barrel a day in Lawrence County in 2024 — were still capable of leaking toxic chemicals that killed plants and animals alike, highlighting the threats posed by marginal wells, which by the state’s own admission account for the vast majority of active oil wells in Illinois.
And yet the company was able to continue operating through violations and spills, the Tribune found, raising questions about how effective the state has been in enforcing laws meant to prevent the kind of widespread environmental damage documented in pages of state records.
The state eventually escalated its attempts at accountability. In January, a Lawrence County grand jury indicted Indian Liberty’s managing member, Brad Delp, on 20 counts stemming from eight other spills beyond the March 2024 leak into the Embarras River. The charges, most felonies, accuse Delp’s company of contaminating Illinois waterways, damaging private property and criminally disposing of waste.
Delp pleaded not guilty. His next court date is in mid-August. In an email to the Tribune, Delp’s attorney said both he and his client declined to comment.
The state’s enforcement targets extended beyond Indian Liberty to include a group of landowners, including an 88-year-old woman, who last February were sent violation notices from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency accusing them of bearing some responsibility for crude oil leaks from Indian Liberty’s equipment.
Those landowners said in response letters, some sent through attorneys, that they did not have any control over Indian Liberty’s oil operations and in some cases did not own the land on which the violations were alleged to have occurred.
Moreover, some said they were “merely innocent victims” who had no lease agreements with the company or any working interest in the oil under their land — in Illinois, as in other oil-producing states, the legal rights to surface land and the minerals below that land are considered separate and can be separately owned.
“I have never been accused of anything like that in my life, and then I get a letter in the mail,” Gray said. “And I was scared to death, because I think, ‘Why am I even involved?’”
Cars, drugs, God and oil
Before he got into the oil business, Brad Delp sold cars. He was apparently so proficient at Westport Auto that the small-town Illinois dealership took out an advertisement in the Jan. 15, 1999, issue of the Vincennes Sun-Commercial newspaper, across the Wabash River in Indiana, to proclaim him as its salesman of the year.
“Buy from the best!” the ad announced above a picture of Delp, dressed in a collared shirt, a slight grin breaking on his face.
His name would again appear in an Indiana newspaper the following year, for a very different reason. On Sept. 22, 2000, the Evansville Courier & Press reported, Delp, then 28, and another man were arrested in a Super Kmart parking lot. Deputies found “several shopping bags of cold medication” in the car Delp had been driving, the brief story noted, as well as “a Tupperware container with amphetamine residue and a loaded .32-caliber gun.”
Indiana authorities filed charges against Delp, court records show: Conspiracy to manufacture a schedule two controlled substance. Possession of a Schedule 2 controlled substance. Possession of marijuana. Carrying a handgun without a permit.
Three months later, while out on bond, Delp drove north along an icy Illinois Route 1 on the southern edge of Lawrenceville and turned into a business parking lot, where he would soon encounter a Lawrence County sheriff’s deputy.
It was 3:16 in the morning on a Thursday, a little over a week before Christmas.
The deputy said in an affidavit that he had been pursuing a vehicle after its driver, whom he identified as Delp, disobeyed a stop sign and failed to use a signal.
Delp had no driver’s license or proof of insurance with him at the time, the affidavit stated. He “was acting very nervous and scared,” as was the 20-year-old woman in the passenger seat.
More officers arrived. One searched the woman’s purse and found “a black bag containing a set of electronic scales and a small clear plastic bag with what appeared to (be) methamphetamine,” the deputy wrote.
Deputies later scoured the roadside looking for objects they suspected had been thrown from the car, the affidavit stated, eventually finding items believed to be ingredients for making methamphetamine: Salt. Coffee filters. Drain opener.
Lawrence County prosecutors charged Delp with intent to manufacture a controlled substance and possession of less than 15 grams of a substance containing meth. His bond was set at $100,000, court records show.
Delp eventually pleaded guilty in the Indiana and Illinois cases and was sentenced to six years and three years in prison, respectively.
Delp wrote about that time in his life in a 2021 article published in Holiness Today, a magazine for the Church of the Nazarene.
“I was a meth addict, drug manufacturer, and had given up my family, my career, my everything for the opportunity to do drugs,” he wrote. “I desired to spend every waking hour making and doing drugs.”
While in jail, Delp wrote, he contemplated suicide. Suddenly, he said he felt God’s presence in his cell and heard a voice ask: “‘What about me, Brad?’”
“Those four words changed my life,” he wrote. “That day, I made a forever commitment to do what God would have me do.”
By 2013, Delp was out of prison and working as a pastor of a Nazarene church in southwestern Indiana, where he also led a drug and alcohol support group.
A year later, he started down a new career path. He and two others formed Liberty Oil Exploration, an LLC based in Olney, Illinois. More companies followed, and in late 2020, Delp and another man filed articles of organization in Florida for another oil company: Indian Liberty.
Delp’s companies acquired oil and gas leases on both sides of the Wabash River, and sold interest in those wells. Quickly, he and those companies became the target of civil suits. Some accused the companies of failing to pay their bills.
In one case from February 2022, Liberty Oil was among the Delp companies sued in Indiana after being accused of failing to pay around $230,000 owed toward the purchase of oil and gas production. The case was dismissed later that year, court records show, when the defendant delivered a check for the full amount owed.
Two months later, a 17-page complaint filed in Indiana’s Spencer County included accusations that Delp sold a working interest in 27 oil leases for $225,000 based on a representation of production that “was false or made recklessly without knowing whether the representation was true or false.”
Delp denied the allegations made in the Spencer County lawsuit and filed a counterclaim to collect a little over $540,000 in allegedly unpaid invoices for work on the wells. The case is still pending.
‘Who’s taking care of it?’
Trees and grass turned brown. A dozen dead minnows floating in a stream. Oil-soaked soil. Corn crops killed with salt water.
These are some of the observations the Tribune found in dozens of state inspector field reports that followed spills associated with Indian Liberty oil wells in recent years.
Common threads across several reports include notes of repeated spills linked to the same well or flow line; the company not immediately notifying state agencies of spills; no efforts being made to clean up or remediate a spill; and failure to submit test results for crude oil contamination as is required by the Illinois DNR to close a case.
In many notices of violation that the Illinois DNR issued the company, it cited aggravating circumstances such as “actual damage to soil and/or the land surface, vegetation or crops, surface water, groundwater, livestock, or wildlife.”
The unnamed tributary where the dead fish were found after a July 2024 spill flows under Octane Lane. Some 500 yards south of that gravel road sits Southeastern Bait and Tackle. Kenneth Banks, the bait shop’s proprietor, recalled oil spills in recent years.
“Question is, who’s taking care of it?” the longtime fisherman asked of the oil polluting the area’s waterways.
After the big spill in March 2024, Banks said, some anglers along the Embarras River have become wary of consuming their catch — mostly catfish and crappie.
A month after that spill, the state took its enforcement a step beyond sending the company violation notices. The attorney general filed a complaint for injunctive relief, asking a Lawrence County judge to order that Indian Liberty clean up affected soil, vegetation and waterways, pay civil penalties of at least $250,000 and cover state expenses incurred during the cleanup effort.
The case remains open, court records show.
Still, in October 2024, Delp’s operation secured a $2.35 million infusion when it sold a 75% working interest in leases on nearly 1,400 of its wells in Lawrence County. The buyer, Sphere Oklahoma Inc., said in court filings that it had been told 160 to 170 of those wells were active and producing an average of 165 barrels of oil per day.
The business deal soon soured, and in November 2025, the Tulsa-based company sued Delp and Indian Liberty, claiming that mismanagement and conduct that was “in many respects grossly negligent” led to spills, rendered wells non-operational, risked shutting down the oil field and threatened to cause Sphere “irreparable harm.”
In the complaint, Sphere said Indian Liberty had failed to disclose that it was under criminal investigation by the attorney general when the sale occurred.
Additionally, Sphere claimed that, after its purchase, production from the field declined “due to ongoing mismanagement and asset dissipation” to fewer than 30 wells producing 38 to 45 barrels of oil per day between June and November 2025.
In response to Delp’s “personal financial struggles,” the complaint alleges, his company sold or scrapped essential production equipment — pumpjacks, tanks and tubing — without consent or compensation, “thereby rendering wells non-operational” and exposing wellbores to collapse.
Sphere’s complaint includes reports from three spills in 2025 as evidence of Indian Liberty’s alleged environmental and regulatory failures, specifically “noncompliance of reporting spills and leaks and basic negligence in knowing the leaks and spills are currently happening.”
Delp’s attorney wrote in a court filing that the company did not breach a contract because none existed — Sphere’s complaint, however, alleges Delp refused to sign an operator agreement.
The Oklahoma company sought and secured the court’s appointment of KIEC Inc. as receiver of the wells, to preserve oil production and injection equipment and to ensure regulatory compliance. Sphere and KIEC share the same mailing address in Tulsa, and the same man, Michael Kimbrel, is identified in records as president of both companies.
Efforts to reach Kimbrel and his attorney were unsuccessful.
As Sphere noted in its complaint, even after the Embarras River spill in March 2024, Indian Liberty continued accumulating notices of violation from the state, and spills reportedly traced back to the company continued soiling land and tainting nearby waters, resulting in repeated field visits from the Illinois EPA and DNR.
“The regulation is there, and the (inspectors) have done a pretty good job. … But they can only do so much,” said Kelly Aldrich, a longtime Lawrence County farmer who has said in complaints to state agencies and in court records that oil and brine leaks from Indian Liberty wells on his property have rendered several acres infertile.
Inspectors can tell an operator what remedial actions to take after a leak or spill, Aldrich said, but “it’s up to the people in Springfield to get them to do it.”
This past January, after almost two years of back-and-forth between Indian Liberty and state regulatory agencies, and at the request of the Illinois attorney general, a warrant was issued for Delp’s arrest in Lawrence County.
Multiple spills, multiple felonies
On a rainy morning this March, Delp stepped out of a small courtroom in the Lawrence County courthouse. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, he talked briefly with his lawyer before leaving the building where, minutes earlier, he had pleaded not guilty to a 20-count indictment.
The charges include 14 Class 4 felonies: causing, threatening or allowing unlawful discharge into state waters, criminal property damage between $500 and $10,000, and criminal disposal of waste exceeding 250 cubic feet. In Illinois, these are punishable by one to three years in prison and up to $25,000 in fines.
Also included in the indictment are six Class A misdemeanors relating to the criminal disposal of waste under 250 cubic feet, punishable by up to one year in prison and a fine between $75 and $2,500 per offense.
Delp’s next hearing in this case is set for Aug. 19, ahead of a jury trial.
The attorney general’s office did not answer requests for comment on how common criminal prosecution is in oil spill cases.
The eight spills at the center of the indictment happened between February and October 2024.
In one of them from February, a flow line leaked 2,100 gallons of oil and 12,600 gallons of salt water — “probably more,” per the initial spill report — that soaked through at least an acre, and several inches deep into the soil, state records show. A state inspector noted in the report that the flow line had been repaired, but the area needed to be remediated by flushing the salt water with fresh water, installing containment booms and digging pits to catch the oil. The inspector said rain was coming that evening, which could carry the leak into a nearby slough or wetland.
A year and a half later, an inspector observed oil in the slough.
In late February 2024, another flow line leaked a few miles south. Over 4,000 gallons of oil pooled in a heavily wooded area, trapped by leaves and debris, ultimately affecting more than 3 acres. “A lot more clean up must be done,” an inspector wrote after a follow-up visit in July.
More than a month later, a pinhole leak near what the Illinois EPA called an inactive well caused 300 gallons of oil and brine to travel 150 feet, entering a small stream and crossing under a road before a dam was used to stop it. The company did not report this spill to the Mount Carmel district office of oil and gas “in a timely manner,” according to the Illinois DNR.
The spill was of relatively small volume and traveled a short distance before being mostly contained. It still took the company five months to clean it up, state documents show, despite repeated visits and reports from the state noting no work was being performed.
During a follow-up visit, according to a field report, an Indian Liberty employee said the ditch had been mostly cleaned up when, in June, a new leak from another nearby well followed the same path.
Also in June that year, a spill had reportedly turned nearby trees and grass brown. During a visit, an Illinois EPA inspector noted the closest identifiable well had been plugged several years prior, but not in a way that met modern requirements. To contain the release, the company had dug catch pits — but during an Illinois DNR visit the next afternoon, an inspector noticed these were already “full and running over.”
A year after that spill, a state report indicated dead plants and trees had been cleared, but no new vegetation was growing, and the well remained unplugged.
In July, nearly 1,700 gallons of oil and salt water entered some woods, ran downhill and into a stream and stopped a couple hundred feet from Muddy Creek, according to state records. The Illinois EPA responded, observing “no cleanup being performed by Indian Liberty, minimal containment, elevated chloride concentrations (from brine) and impacts to aquatic wildlife in the tributary” — including about 15 dead minnows. In an initial Illinois DNR report, the agency noted it appeared the operator had repaired the ruptured flow line.
But three days later, more than 3,300 gallons of oil and water spilled from the same line, reaching the same waterway through the woods, records show. According to the Illinois EPA, “high pressure in the system allegedly caused the line to fail again.”
An inspection in August still found visible oil and affected vegetation in the area and, after recent heavy rainfall, noted dams had “reportedly washed away.” In another follow-up report a year later, an inspector noted, “Affected area is not growing vegetation, dead trees in the area have not been cleaned up.”
According to state records, for at least a year after each of these spills, the company still had not submitted any test results to determine the concentration of crude oil compounds in soil and water.
‘Aggrieved landowners’
In early 2025, Kelly Aldrich and his wife received an unexpected letter in the mail. It detailed 12 violations of the Illinois Environmental Protection Act and Illinois Pollution Control Board regulations, related to crude oil leaks, sludge waste and contamination from and near tank batteries, pumpjacks and flow lines observed during inspections on his property months earlier.
“While I respect your position of authority and will attempt to assist you in resolving any issues on the surface of our land,” Aldrich wrote back, “I ask that you please study the facts that we only own the surface of the land involved and have suffered much more land damage and crop losses than any area listed in your reports.”
Toward the end of his response letter, he added in bold: “Please help to quickly calm the fears of the other innocent surface owners and people who have no control over oil operations who have received these Violation Notices.”
At least six other private landowners in Lawrence County, including individuals and companies, received similar correspondence, according to records reviewed by the Tribune.
And they all offered the state similar responses, denying the allegations and distinguishing between land ownership and the rights to coal, oil, gas or other minerals underlying their real estate. The landowners said they had no working interests in the latter, meaning they didn’t have the legal authority to operate the production equipment or the ability to control and clean up pollution. In some cases, respondents said the Illinois EPA had referred to wells that were not even located on their property.
“They said we may be responsible for cleaning up the mess that the oil company made,” Aldrich told the Tribune. “Myself, I don’t own any of the mineral rights.”
Most of the landowners and their attorneys declined to talk to the Tribune on the record.
In one of the responses, an attorney wrote, “Since the Respondents are more properly described as aggrieved landowners themselves, rather than violators of the Act, it would be appropriate for the Illinois EPA to focus its efforts against Indian Liberty to address each of the alleged violations.”
The agency had, in fact, also issued violation notices to Delp, Indian Liberty and someone registered as an agent for the company with the Illinois secretary of state. In a follow-up letter to Delp that summer, the Illinois EPA said it had not received a response.
The company replied a month later, on letterhead that reads “Indian Liberty: Free to crude.”
“We have come up with multiple plans of action for all the alleged violations,” the company responded in the unsigned letter. It sought to enter a compliance agreement with the state, and delineated steps it would take to address 11 pieces of equipment at the center of the violations (three of which would later become part of the state’s indictment against Delp). It also requested a meeting with the agency.
At the end of the summer, however, the Illinois EPA had sent the company and Delp a notice of intent to pursue legal action regarding a dozen violations observed during two late 2024 visits to their facility in Petrolia — the one where the spill into the Embarras originated earlier that year.
Even after it heard back from the landowners, the Illinois EPA rejected the objections from most of them, also warning them of possible legal action.
As it later did with Indian Liberty, the agency wrote back to the landowners, citing “the nature and seriousness” of the alleged violations, that resolution may not be possible without involving the attorney general, the state’s attorney, the U.S. EPA or another “prosecutorial authority.”
“I asked the people from (the Illinois) EPA how they could do that, and they said, ‘Well, you may have to prove that you didn’t do everything you could to stop these leaks,’” Aldrich recalled. “I said, ‘Anytime I see a leak on my field, the next thing, I call the operator.’ And he didn’t show up … then I had to call the state. And they came out. And they said, ‘Well, you still better get your lawyer.’”
In an emailed response to Tribune questions, an Illinois EPA spokesperson said, “When a release occurs on property owned by a person, that person can be held responsible for the clean-up of their property. Landowners commonly receive violation notices to ensure cooperation with the remediation that needs to occur on their site.”
Only one violation, which was issued to an 88-year-old woman, was retracted.
The Illinois EPA spokesperson said the agency retracted that violation after learning the parcel’s ownership included “multiple individuals, trusts and receiverships.”
The agency “determined not to move forward with formal enforcement against any landowners in this case,” the spokesperson added, saying that those individuals and entities “helped ensure that their properties were remediated” and were told through their attorneys that they would not be referred to the Illinois attorney general’s office for enforcement.
In late 2025, Aldrich and his wife filed a complaint against Indian Liberty, alleging its operations on their land caused damages to their farm equipment, the fertile topsoil and the drainage tile.
The company was served with the complaint on Jan. 16, 2026, three days after Delp was arrested on charges brought against him by the state.
Indian Liberty denied the allegations in Aldrich’s suit, in some cases because it “(was) without sufficient information to admit or deny.” The company also said that, “by entering into an oil and gas lease, Plaintiff (Aldrich) assumed the risk of damage, if any, being caused to their real property by oil and gas operations” and waived the right to seek damages. It also claimed the landowners failed to mitigate damages and acted negligently in their farm operations.
The operator then demanded another jury trial in that case.
An uncertain future for low-producing wells
Five years have passed since Indian Liberty entered the state’s oil and gas industry, leaving in its wake reams of public records that document leaks, environmental damage, violation notices, lawsuits and criminal charges.
Back when it acquired oil wells in southeastern Illinois, the company posted a $100,000 bond, which, until a 2025 law change, was the maximum insurance policy operators were required to put up should they shirk their cleanup responsibilities.
In Indian Liberty’s case, that amounted to around $70 per well.
That bond was forfeited in May of last year, after Indian Liberty failed to plug inactive wells under orders from the Illinois DNR.
Most of the company’s wells were transferred this April to KIEC, the Oklahoma company that had been appointed as a receiver late last year. It’s unclear what the new owners’ plans are for them.
Before the transfer, Indian Liberty’s oil wells in Lawrence County reportedly produced an average of 0.13 barrels a day, according to county tax records for 2024, the most recent year available. A barrel of oil yields around 20 gallons of motor gasoline, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration, meaning each well was capable on average of producing 2.6 gallons of gas a day.
Indian Liberty still has 17 oil wells in Illinois, despite secretary of state records showing its business license was revoked this July. The Illinois DNR says it has inspected all 17 and “will continue to do so through follow-up inspections for violations as well as annual inspections.”
