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Baker Hughes US rig count down 2 to 537
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Baker Hughes' U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 537 on July 11, down by two from the previous week -- the eleventh consecutive week of drops. The count was down by 47 from 584 a year ago, down by 10 from two weeks ago and down 47 over the 11 weeks. This is the lowest the rig count has been since October 2021.
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.
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.
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 July 11 count includes 424 rigs targeting oil, down by one from the previous week and down 54 from 47i a year ago, with 108 rigs targeting natural gas, unchanged from the previous week and up eight from 100 a year ago, and five miscellaneous rigs, down one from the previous week and down by one from a year ago.
Forty-three of the rigs reported July 11 were drilling directional wells, 478 were drilling horizontal wells and 16 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged No states had week-over-week rig count increases.
Oklahoma (42) and Texas (255) were each down by one rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), California (6), Colorado (8), Louisiana (31), New Mexico (90), North Dakota (29), Ohio (11), Pennsylvania (17), Utah (9), West Virginia (7) and Wyoming (17).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active July 11, unchanged from the previous week and up by one from a year ago when the state's count was nine.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was unchanged from the previous week at 265 and down by 40 from 305 a year ago.
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