Salem, Centralia, Kinmundy: we buy minerals and royalties throughout Marion County, home of the Salem Consolidated field and the Patoka terminal.
Marion County is where the Illinois boom happened. Adams Oil and Gas hit on the Merryman farm near Patoka in 1937, Salem came in the next year and produced more than 20 million barrels in its first twelve months, and the county alone made 93 million barrels in 1939. What is left is a mature waterflood county: Citation's Salem Unit, the Centralia and Patoka fields, and thousands of unit participations owned by the descendants of the people who leased in the 1930s.
What produces here. The Illinois Petroleum Resources Board puts Marion County at 676,772 barrels for calendar 2025, second in the state behind White, down from 702,950 in 2024. Almost all of it is Salem Consolidated, which Citation Oil and Gas bought from Texaco in 1998 and runs as the Salem Unit, with a gas plant built in 2005 to 2007 and current work focused on Devonian producers and injectors and on reactivating Aux Vases and McClosky wells; the ISGS well database still shows about 4,200 unplugged oil producer records and 800 active injection wells in the county, most of them carrying the old Texas Company and Magnolia names. The rest comes from Centralia, Iuka, Patoka, Tonti, Exchange, Miletus and Kinmundy North, with Penn Energy, Schwartz Oil Properties, Citation and CountryMark Energy Resources on the recent permits. New drilling is light but not zero: the IDNR permit logs show Penn Energy's Malan 7 and Carter 6 in March 2025, Schwartz Oil's Howell lease horizontals in the Yankeetown-Benoist and Cypress at about 1,600 feet near Centralia in June 2025 and July 2026, and Ameren Illinois permitting three horizontal gas storage wells at Centralia in July and August 2026. The Patoka terminal, with nearly 80 tanks and more than 19 million barrels of storage, sits in the north end of the county.
Whatever you own here, producing royalties, non-producing acreage, or an inherited fraction split among family, we will identify it from whatever paperwork you have, value it off the actual wells and activity, and show you the reasoning with the offer. Free, no obligation, and no pressure: if keeping it is the right answer, we will say so. Inherited it? Start with inherited mineral rights in Illinois.
Discovered in 1938, more than 20 million barrels in its first twelve months and 95 million in 1940 alone, the second largest field in the country at the time. Today it is Citation's Salem Unit, a Devonian and Mississippian waterflood with its own gas plant.
The deep Devonian carbonate under Salem and Centralia, and the Mississippian Benoist (Yankeetown), McClosky and Aux Vases that carry the rest of the county: Centralia, Iuka, Patoka, Tonti, Exchange and Miletus.
Wherever your tract sits in Marion County, we will research it free and value it with the work shown.
We buy in every Illinois county, including ones without a page here. See the full county index or the Illinois overview.
Whether you need a probate, the affidavit and transfer on death routes, the dormant mineral rules, and where unpaid royalties go: inherited mineral rights in Illinois, what heirs should do.
What Illinois mineral rights are worth, information only, with this month's activity. Unclaimed Illinois royalties: where the money goes and how an heir claims it.
Everything a Illinois owner needs in one place: who owns what under state law, how royalties must be paid and by when, what a buyer can and cannot deduct, the tax treatment of a sale, and the deadlines that quietly cost people their minerals. Free, and no sign-up.
Read the Illinois guideThe things owners here most often wish they had read first. All free, none of it gated.
Free, no obligation, and no pressure. We reply within one business day, usually faster.
Prefer the phone? Call or text 918-984-1645 and you will get Stephen, the owner, not a call center. If we miss you, we text back the same day.
In a hurry? Text a photo of a royalty check stub to 918-984-1645 and our preliminary offer puts a written number in front of you within about two business days. It holds for 7 while you decide.