US rotary drilling rig count up 3 to 782

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

The Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 782 on Nov. 18, up by three from the previous week and up 219 from 563 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. 18 count includes 623 rigs targeting oil, up by one from the previous week and up 162 from 461 a year ago, with 157 rigs targeting natural gas, up by two from the previous week and up 55 from 102 a year ago, and two miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.

Forty-five of the rigs reported Nov. 18 were drilling directional wells, 714 were drilling horizontal wells and 23 were drilling vertical wells.

Alaska rig count unchanged

Utah (13) was up by a single rig.

New Mexico (103) was down by three rigs week over week.

Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), California (5), Colorado (22), Louisiana (65), North Dakota (38), Ohio (13), Pennsylvania (22), West Virginia (17) and Wyoming (24).

Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active Nov. 18, 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 down by one from the previous week at 349 and up by 71 from 278 a year ago.

- KRISTEN NELSON