|
Baker Hughes US rig count down 2 at 544
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Baker Hughes' U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 544 on Jan. 9, down two from the previous week. The domestic rig count has ranged from the 530s through the 550s since the beginning of June.
For 2025, the count peaked Feb. 28 (and again March 21) at 593, hitting its low point Aug. 29 at 526. For 2024, the count peaked March 1 (and again March 15) at 629, hitting its low point June 28 at 581. In 2023 the count peaked early in the year at 775 on Jan. 13, bottoming out Nov. 10 at 616.
A drop of 17 to 731 on May 12, 2023, was the steepest weekly drop since June of 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the count also dropped by 17 to 284 on June 5, following drops as steep as 73 rigs in one week in April. The count continued down to 251 at the end of July 2020, reaching an all-time low of 244 in mid-August 2020.
When the count dropped to 244 in mid-August 2020, it was the lowest the domestic rotary rig count had been since the Houston based oilfield services company began issuing weekly U.S. numbers in 1944.
Prior to 2020, the low was 404 rigs in May 2016. The count peaked at 4,530 in 1981.
The count was in the low 790s at the beginning of 2020 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, where it remained through mid-March of that year when it began to fall, dropping below what had been the historic low in early May with a count of 374 and continuing to drop through the third week of August 2020 when it gained back 10 rigs.
The Jan. 9 count includes 409 rigs targeting oil, down by three from the previous week and down 71 from 480 a year ago, with 124 rigs targeting natural gas, down by one from the previous week and up 24 from 100 a year ago, and 11 miscellaneous rigs, up two from the previous week and up by seven from a year ago.
Fifty-seven of the rigs reported Jan. 9 were drilling directional wells, 475 were drilling horizontal wells and 12 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged Utah (17) was up four rigs from the previous week while Colorado (12) was up by a single rig.
Louisiana (40) was down by three rigs week over week; New Mexico (100), North Dakota (26), Texas (230) and Wyoming (15) were each down by one rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (9), California (8), Ohio (14), Oklahoma (43), Pennsylvania (18) and West Virginia (7).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with nine rotary rigs active Jan. 9, unchanged from the previous week and down by one from a year ago when the state's count was 10.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was down three from the previous week at 244 and down by 60 from 304 a year ago.
| 