How far apart are oil wells usually drilled?

Answer 1

2 things to take in considerations :
1/ The risk of collision when drilling another well. Usually each company has its own rules of safety. The location of a well is known within a certain uncertainty cone, at the surface one is pretty sure of the position and the uncertainty is increasing with the depth. So one must take care of this uncertainty.
2/ The physical and geometrical properties of the reservoir rock containing the oil are conditioning the spacing of your well. These properties are mainly :
- Porosity : the percentage of void within a given volume of rock, the larger the porosity the more oil it might contains.
- Type of porosity : are the pore connected together ?
- Permeability : the ability of rock to transmit fluids through pore spaces
- Saturation : percentage of oil/water within a reservoir
- Oil viscosity
- Number of compartiments : your fields might be broken in pieces a bit like a cake
etc, etc....
The spacing unit is usually a multiple of 100 m, meaning you can have one well every 100 m (quite unlikely or at least only in some section of the field) to km.

Answer 2

in the continental USA, one well per 40 acres is common for oil and 160 acres for gas, this is regulated by state and federal rule to prevent wasteful overdrilling. besides geologic considerations, 40 acres is a 1/4 - 1/4 breakdown of a section and was a common land ownership basis during the homestead days. because minerals were an additional fee, many areas continue to have federal mineral ownership, so there is a checker board of state and federal regulated production. Other areas of the west that were never homesteaded have both land and mineral under BLM control. If the oil producers think an exception to the 40 acre rule is needed, a special production "unit" is created to manage the spacing requirements and insure that every rights owner shares equally in production without respect to what is produced from individual wells. The newer fields drilled on BLM land sometimes have 4 or more wells drilled from one location. They go out in different directions to achieve the same over-all production pattern, but this greatly reduces the surface impact on the environment.

Answer 3

This really depends on the reservoir and how connected it is. In a highly compartmentalized oil reservoir, more wells in closer proximity to each other would be needed to make sure all the oil can be accessed.

Answer 4

they can be very very close together (only a few yards away). I live in northwest Texas and there are tons of oil wells here. Ours out here look like these: http://www.thurmondmcglothlin.com/image/2216752.jpeg

Answer 5

they are drilled at least 300 ft away because most oil plots are that large and they need space

Answer 6

depends on the reservoir