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US rotary drilling rig count up 2 to 784
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 784 on Nov. 23 (the count done on Wednesday rather than Friday because of Thanksgiving), up by two from the previous week and up 215 from 569 a year ago.
When the count dropped to 244 more than two years ago, 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 Nov. 23 count includes 627 rigs targeting oil, up by four from the previous week and up 160 from 467 a year ago, with 155 rigs targeting natural gas, down by two from the previous week and up 53 from 102 a year ago, and two miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.
Forty-seven of the rigs reported Nov. 23 were drilling directional wells, 714 were drilling horizontal wells and 23 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged New Mexico (105) was up by two rigs from the previous week.
California (6), Louisiana (66) and Oklahoma (70) were each up by one rig.
Texas (372) was down by three rigs week over week.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), Colorado (22), North Dakota (38), Ohio (13), Pennsylvania (22), Utah (10), West Virginia (17) and Wyoming (24).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active Nov. 23, unchanged from the previous week and up by four from a year ago, when the state’s rig count stood at six. Nine of the rigs in Alaska were onshore and one was offshore, also unchanged from the previous week.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by three from the previous week at 352 and up by 72 from 280 a year ago.
- KRISTEN NELSON
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