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At 771, US rotary rig count is down by 4
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 771 on Jan. 20, down by four from the previous week and up 167 from 604 a year ago.
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, 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. 20 count includes 613 rigs targeting oil, down 10 from the previous week and up 122 from 491 a year ago, with 156 rigs targeting natural gas, up by six from the previous week and up 43 from 113 a year ago, and two miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.
Forty-nine of the rigs reported Jan. 20 were drilling directional wells, 700 were drilling horizontal wells and 22 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count down by 1 The Texas rig count (380) was up by one from the previous week.
Louisiana (64) was down three rigs week over week; Alaska (8) and New Mexico (102) were each down a single rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: California (5), Colorado (20), North Dakota (39), Ohio (14), Oklahoma (64), Pennsylvania (21), Utah (12), West Virginia (17) and Wyoming (20).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with eight rotary rigs active Jan. 20, down one from the previous week and up by two from a year ago, when the state’s rig count stood at six. All eight of the Alaska rigs were onshore, unchanged from the previous week. There were no offshore rigs active in the state.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was down by two from the previous week at 354 and up by 62 from 292 a year ago.
- KRISTEN NELSON
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