US rotary rig count up by 4 to 763

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

The Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 763 on Sept. 16, up by four from the previous week and up 251 from 512 a year ago.

When the count dropped to 244 more than two years ago, 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 Sept. 16 count includes 599 rigs targeting oil, up by eight from the previous week and up 188 from 411 a year ago, with 162 rigs targeting natural gas, down by four from the previous week and up 62 from 100 a year ago, and two miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by one from a year ago.

Forty-five of the rigs reported Sept. 16 were drilling directional wells, 699 were drilling horizontal wells and 23 were drilling vertical wells.

Alaska rig count unchanged

New Mexico (108) and North Dakota (38) were each down by one rig week over week.

Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), California (7), Colorado (21), Kansas (1), Ohio (11), Oklahoma (64), Pennsylvania (23), Utah (13), West Virginia (13) and Wyoming (20).

Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active Sept. 16, unchanged from the previous week and up by five from a year ago, when the state’s rig count stood at five. Nine of the rigs in Alaska were onshore, up by one, and one was offshore, down by one from the previous week.

The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by three from the previous week at 343 and up by 84 from 259 a year ago.

- KRISTEN NELSON