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US rotary rig count unchanged at 771
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 771 on Jan. 27, unchanged from the previous week and up 161 from 610 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. 27 count includes 609 rigs targeting oil, down four from the previous week and up 114 from 495 a year ago, with 160 rigs targeting natural gas, up by four from the previous week and up 45 from 115 a year ago, and two miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.
Forty-five of the rigs reported Jan. 27 were drilling directional wells, 706 were drilling horizontal wells and 21 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged The New Mexico rig count (105) was up by three from the previous week.
North Dakota (41) was up two rigs week over week and Pennsylvania (22) was up by a single rig.
Louisiana (61) was down by three rigs and West Virginia (16) was down one rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (8), California (5), Colorado (20), Ohio (14), Oklahoma (64), Texas (380), Utah (12) and Wyoming (20).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with eight rotary rigs active Jan. 27, unchanged 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 up by three from the previous week at 357 and up by 64 from 293 a year ago.
- KRISTEN NELSON
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