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Baker Hughes US rig count drops 6 to 578
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Baker Hughes' U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 578 on May 9, down by six from the previous week, down by 25 from 603 a year ago and down by nine from two weeks ago. Over the last eight weeks the rig count was up in three weeks and down in five with a combined loss of 19 against a gain of five.
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.
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.
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 May 9 count includes 474 rigs targeting oil, down by five from the previous week and down 22 from 496 a year ago, with 101 rigs targeting natural gas, unchanged from the previous week and down two from 103 a year ago, and three miscellaneous rigs, down by one from the previous week and down by one from a year ago.
Forty-one of the rigs reported May 9 were drilling directional wells, 522 were drilling horizontal wells and 15 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged Texas (273) was up by two rigs from the previous week; Utah (12) was up one.
New Mexico (96) was down by four rigs week over week. Louisiana (30) was down by three and Wyoming (19) was down two.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), California (6), Colorado (8), North Dakota (32), Ohio (9), Oklahoma (55), Pennsylvania (18), and West Virginia (8).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active May 9, unchanged from the previous week and up by one from a year ago when the state's count was nine.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was down by two from the previous week at 285 and down by 29 from 314 a year ago.
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