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US rig count down 1, first drop in a month
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes U.S. rotary drilling rig count dropped by one rig the week ending June 4, to 456, the first time the count has dropped (also by one) since April 23. The count was up by 172 from 284 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 June 4 count includes 359 rigs targeting oil, unchanged from the previous week and up by 153 from 206 a year ago, 97 rigs targeting gas, down by one from the previous week and up by 21 from 76 a year ago, and no miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and down by two from a year ago.
Twenty-five of the rigs reported June 4 were drilling directional wells, 415 were drilling horizontal wells and 16 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged The New Mexico rig count (73) was up by two rigs from the previous week.
Louisiana (52) was down by one rig and Texas (216) was down by two.
Counts in all other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (4), California (6), Colorado (9), North Dakota (16), Ohio (10), Oklahoma (28), Pennsylvania (17), Utah (9), West Virginia (11) and Wyoming (4).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with four rigs active June 4, unchanged from the previous week and up by one from a year ago, when the state’s count stood at three.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was down by one from the previous week at 232 and up by 91 from a count of 141 a year ago.
International count Baker Hughes’ international rig count (which excludes North America) was 750 in May, up by 55 from April, with land rigs up 41 to 451 and offshore rigs up 14 to 179, the company said in a June 4 release. The international rig count was down 55 from last year’s count of 805, with land rigs down by 39 and offshore rigs down by 16.
The worldwide rig count for May, international and North America, was 1,262, up by 73 from 1,189 in April and up by 86 from 1,176 in May 2020.
The U.S. rig count averaged 453 in May, up 17 from an April average of 436 and up 105 from May 2020.
The Canadian rig count averaged 59 in May, up by one from an April average of 58 and up 36 year-over-year.
The Houston based oilfield services company began issuing weekly U.S. numbers in 1944 and began issuing the monthly international rig count in 1975.
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