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by 41b696ef1113 1418 days ago
How many oil wells/barrels/square kilometers are currently dedicated to producing the world's jet fuel needs?
2 comments

Wow, the US has just under a million operating U.S. oil and natural gas wells? That number surprised me, I don't know what I expected but I wouldn't have guessed that many.

https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/wells/pdf/full_report.pdf

Couple of interesting to things to note:

Oil wells have super long useful lives (50+ years) but The majority only produce <15bbl/day due to decline curves (especially pronounced gor.

The footprint of a well pad is pretty small one they’re in production ~<1/4 - 1/2 /acre. Many modern well pads can have multiple wells (4/6/12) due to directional drilling, further increasing well count.

Well, we are the largest producer of oil in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
About the same amount of land.

In North America alone, 30,000 square kilometers for all oil and gas[0].

For a rough approximation, the US produced 14% of oil in the world in 2021[1] and this guy on Quora[2] says that 12% of the world's oil and gas goes into aviation fuel.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/thirty-thousand-squa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...

[2] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-world-s-crude-o...

That’s all oil and gas activity; jet fuel accounts for only a very small fraction of that.
Already pipelines running from those areas :-) maybe in the future can transport solar jet fuel instead?