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US rotary drill rig count up 8 to 754
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was up by eight for the week ending March 17 to 754, and up 91 from a count of 663 for the same period a year ago. This is only the second time in the past eight weeks that the count has increased. The high so far this year was 771 on Jan. 20. 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, 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 March 17 count includes 589 rigs targeting oil, down one from the previous week and up 65 from 524 a year ago, with 162 rigs targeting natural gas, up nine from the previous week and up 25 from 137 a year ago, and three miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.
Forty-seven of the rigs reported March 17 were drilling directional wells, 692 were drilling horizontal wells and 15 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged Texas (371) was up by five rigs from the previous week.
New Mexico (106) was up by three rigs.
Pennsylvania (24) and West Virginia (16) were each up by two rigs.
Colorado (19) and Oklahoma (62) were each up by a single rig.
Ohio (11) was down by three rigs week over week.
Louisiana (57) was down by two rigs and Wyoming (19) was down one rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), California (2), North Dakota (41) and Utah (11).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active March 17, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago, when the state’s rig count stood at eight. Nine of the Alaska rigs were onshore, down by one from the previous week, and one rig working offshore, an increase of one.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by seven from the previous week at 350 and up by 34 from 316 a year ago.
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