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US rotary drilling rig count down 1 at 763
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 763 on Aug. 12, down by one from the previous week and up by 262 from 501 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 Aug. 12 count includes 601 rigs targeting oil, up by three from the previous week and up 203 from 398 a year ago, with 160 rigs targeting natural gas, down by one from the previous week and up 58 from 102 a year ago, and two miscellaneous rigs, down by three from the previous week and up by one from a year ago.
Thirty-nine of the rigs reported Aug. 12 were drilling directional wells, 693 were drilling horizontal wells and 31 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count down by one The Louisiana rig count (64) was up by two from the previous week.
Oklahoma (65) and West Virginia (13) were each up by one rig.
Pennsylvania (23) was down by two rigs week over week.
Alaska (9) and Texas (372) were each down by a single rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged week over week: California (7), Colorado (21), New Mexico (104), North Dakota (37), Ohio (11), Utah (12) and Wyoming (20).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with nine rotary rigs active Aug. 12, down by one from the previous week and up by five from a year ago, when the state’s rig count stood at four. Eight of the rigs in Alaska were onshore, one was offshore - with the offshore count down by one from the previous week.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was down by one from the previous week at 346 and up by 100 from 246 a year ago.
- KRISTEN NELSON
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