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US drilling rig count up by one to 403
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes U.S. rotary drilling rig count, 403 for the week ending March 5, was up by one from the week ending Feb. 26 and down 390 from a count of 793 a year ago.
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 March 5 count includes 310 rigs targeting oil, up by one from the previous week and down 372 from 682 a year ago, 92 rigs targeting gas, unchanged from the previous week but down 17 from 109 a year ago, and one miscellaneous rig, unchanged from the previous week and down one from a year ago.
Sixteen of the holes reported March 5 were directional, 362 were horizontal and 25 were vertical.
Alaska unchanged from previous week Texas (202), with the most active rigs, was up by five from the previous week, the only state with a week-over-week increase.
Louisiana (45) was down by two rigs from the previous week; New Mexico (61) and North Dakota (13) were each down by a single rig.
Counts in all other states remained unchanged: Alaska (3), California (7), Colorado (8), Ohio (7), Oklahoma (17), Pennsylvania (20), Utah (3), West Virginia (11) and Wyoming (5).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with three rigs active March 5, unchanged from the previous week and down by seven from a year ago, when the state’s count stood at 10.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by three from the previous week at 211, but down by 204 from a count of 415 a year ago.
International Baker Hughes international rig count - which excludes the U.S. and Canada - averaged 701 in February, the company said in a March 5 release, up 24 rigs from an average 677 active rigs in January, and down 384 from a February 2020 average of 1,085 rigs.
The U.S. count averaged 398 in February, up 29 from a January average of 369 and down 393 from a February 2020 average of 791. The Canadian count averaged 171 in February, up 34 from January and down 78 from a February 2020 count of 249.
The total worldwide count averaged 1,270 in February, up 87 rigs from an average of 1,183 in January and down 855 from a February 2020 average of 2,125.
Baker Hughes has issued weekly rig counts for the U.S. and Canada since 1944 and began issuing international rig counts monthly in 1975.
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