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Baker Hughes US rig count unchanged
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Baker Hughes' U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 551 on Feb. 20, unchanged from the previous week and down 41 from 592 a year ago. The domestic rig count has ranged from the 530s through the 550s since the beginning of June.
For 2025, the count peaked Feb. 28 (and again March 21) at 593, hitting its low point Aug. 29 at 526. 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.
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.
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 Feb. 20 count includes 409 rigs targeting oil, unchanged from the previous week and down 79 from 488 a year ago, with 133 rigs targeting natural gas, unchanged from the previous week and up 34 from 99 a year ago, and nine miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by four from a year ago.
Fifty-five of the rigs reported Feb. 20 were drilling directional wells, 483 were drilling horizontal wells and 13 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count up by 2 Alaska (11) was up by two rigs from the previous week while Texas (230) was up by a single rig.
Louisiana (39) was down by two rigs week over week; New Mexico (101) was down by one rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: California (7), Colorado (14), North Dakota (26), Ohio (13), Oklahoma (45), Pennsylvania (20), Utah (16), West Virginia (7) and Wyoming (17).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 11 rotary rigs active Feb. 20, up by two from the previous week and up by one from a year ago when the state's count was 10.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by one from the previous week at 239 and down by 65 from 304 a year ago.
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