US drilling rig count unchanged at 397

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

The Baker Hughes U.S. rotary drilling rig count, 397 for the week ending Feb. 19, was unchanged from Feb. 12, the first time since Nov. 25 that the count has not seen a week-over-week increase. Year-over-year the count is down, by 394, from a count of 791.

When the count bottomed out at 244 in mid-August last year, it was not just the low for 2020, but the lowest the 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 when it gained back 10 rigs.

The Feb. 19 count includes 305 rigs targeting oil, down by one from the previous week and down 374 from 679 a year ago, 91 rigs targeting gas, up one the previous week but down 19 from 110 a year ago, and one miscellaneous rig, unchanged from the previous week and down one from a year ago.

Sixteen of the holes reported Feb. 19 were directional, 357 were horizontal and 24 were vertical.

Alaska down one from previous week

Alaska (3) and Louisiana (47) were each down by one.

Counts in all other states remained unchanged: California (7), Colorado (8), New Mexico (61), Ohio (7), Oklahoma (17), Pennsylvania (18), Utah (3), West Virginia (12) and Wyoming (5).

Baker Hughes shows Alaska with three rigs active Feb. 19, down by one from the previous week and down by nine from a year ago, when the state’s count stood at 12.

The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by one from the previous week at 204, but down by 205 from a count of 409 a year ago.

- KRISTEN NELSON