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Baker Hughes US rig count down 2 to 616
Second week in a row of declines, with largest drops in Louisiana, down 3 and Texas, down 2; single rig gains in four states
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes' U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 616 for the week ending Nov. 10, down by two rigs from the previous week, and down by 163 from 779 a year ago. The rig count has decreased in five of the last eight weeks, continuing a downward trend dominant since the beginning of May.
A drop of 17 on May 12 was the steepest drop since June of 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Nov. 10 count is the lowest since Feb. 4, 2022, when the count was 613. The count dropped below 700 the week ending June 2, the first time it has been that low since April 2022. This week's count is down from a high so far this year of 775 on Jan. 13. The high for 2022 was a count of 784 rigs at the beginning of December.
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 Nov. 10 count includes 494 rigs targeting oil, down by two from the previous week and down by 128 from 622 a year ago, with 118 rigs targeting natural gas, unchanged from the previous week and down 37 from 155 a year ago, and four miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.
Fifty-three of the rigs reported Nov. 10 were drilling directional wells, 551 were drilling horizontal wells and 12 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged New Mexico (105), Ohio (13), Oklahoma (37) and Wyoming (18) were each up by a single rig from the previous week.
Louisiana (38) was down by three rigs, week over week.
Texas (302) was down by two rigs and Pennsylvania (19) was down by a single rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (9), California (5), Colorado (16), North Dakota (29), Utah (13) and West Virginia (8).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with nine rotary rigs active Nov. 10, unchanged from the previous week and down by one from a year ago when the count was 10. Eight of the Alaska rigs were onshore, unchanged from the previous week, with one rig working offshore, also unchanged.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was unchanged from the previous week at 310 and down by 40 from 350 a year ago.
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