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Rig count tops 600 for 1st time since 2020
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count topped 600 for the week ending Jan. 14, at 601 a gain of 13 rigs over the previous week and up 228 from a count of 373 a year ago. This is the first time the count has topped 600 since April 2020 and the first time since April 2021 that the week-over-week gain has been this large.
When the count dropped to 244 in mid-August 2020 it was the lowest the domestic rotary rig 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 2020 when it gained back 10 rigs.
The Jan. 14 count includes 492 rigs targeting oil, up 11 from the previous week and up 205 from 287 a year ago, with 109 rigs targeting gas, up by two from the previous week and up 24 from 85 a year ago, and no miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and down by one from a year ago.
Thirty-five of the rigs reported Jan. 14 were drilling directional wells, 541 were drilling horizontal wells and 25 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count up by one Texas (281) was up by seven rigs from the previous week, while Louisiana (55) was up by three.
Alaska (6), Pennsylvania (20) and West Virginia (11) were each up by one rig from the previous week.
Rig counts in all other states were unchanged week over week: California (8), Colorado (12), New Mexico (95), North Dakota (27), Ohio (11), Oklahoma (49), Utah (9) and Wyoming (16).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with six rigs active Jan. 14, up by one from the previous week and up by three from a year ago, when the state’s rig count stood at three.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by one from the previous week at 293 and up by 104 from 189 a year ago.
- KRISTEN NELSON
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