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At 588, Baker Hughes US rig count up by 2
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count for the week ending Jan. 7 stood at 588, up by two rigs from the previous week and up 228 from a count of 360 a year ago.
When the count dropped to 244 in mid-August 2020 it was the lowest the domestic rotary rig count has 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, where it remained through mid-March, 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. 7 count includes 481 rigs targeting oil, up by one from the previous week and up 206 from 275 a year ago, with 107 rigs targeting gas, also up by one from the previous week and up 23 from 84 a year ago, and no miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and down by one from a year ago.
Thirty-three of the rigs reported Jan. 7 were drilling directional wells, 532 were drilling horizontal wells and 23 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged Louisiana (52) was up by three rigs from the previous week.
New Mexico (95) and Wyoming (16) were each up by one rig from the previous week.
Texas (274) was down by three rigs from the previous week.
Rig counts in all other states were unchanged week over week: Alaska (5), California (8), Colorado (12), North Dakota (27), Ohio (11), Oklahoma (49), Pennsylvania (19), Utah (9) and West Virginia (10).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with five rigs active Jan. 7, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago, when the state’s rig count stood at three.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was down by one from the previous week at 292 and up by 113 from 179 a year ago.
International count up 17 Baker Hughes issues its international rig count monthly, information it began providing in 1975. The company said international rigs exclude North America; those rigs are included in worldwide figures.
The international count for December, issued Jan. 7, is up by 17 from November to 834, Baker Hughes said, with land rigs up by 20 to 648 and offshore rigs down by three to 186.
The international count is up by 169 rigs from the comparable count in 2021, 665, with land rigs up by 139 and offshore rigs up by 30.
The Middle East accounts for the most rigs in the international count, 282 in December, followed by Asia Pacific with 193, Latin America with 158, Europe with 114 and Africa with 87.
The U.S. rig count averaged 579 in December, up 19 from November’s average of 560, and up by 240 from December 2020, while the Canadian count for December averaged 150, down 17 from a November average of 167 and up by 50 from December 2020.
Worldwide the rig count was 1,563 in December, up by 19 from 1,544 in November and up by 459 from 1,104 last December.
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