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US rotary drilling rig count up 3 to 775
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 775 on Jan. 13, up by three from the previous week and up 174 from 601 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. 13 count includes 623 rigs targeting oil, up by five from the previous week and up 131 from 492 a year ago, with 150 rigs targeting natural gas, down by two from the previous week and up 41 from 109 a year ago, and two miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.
Forty-nine of the rigs reported Jan. 13 were drilling directional wells, 700 were drilling horizontal wells and 26 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged The New Mexico rig count (103) was up by three from the previous week.
California (5), Louisiana (67) and Texas (379) were each up by one.
Oklahoma (64) was down by two rigs week over week and Colorado (20) was down by a single rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (9), North Dakota (39), Ohio (14), Pennsylvania (21), Utah (12), West Virginia (17) and Wyoming (20).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with nine rotary rigs active Jan. 13, unchanged from the previous week and up by three from a year ago, when the state’s rig count stood at six. All nine 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 356 and up by 63 from 293 a year ago.
- KRISTEN NELSON
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