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US drilling rig count rises by 9 to 360
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes U.S. rotary drilling rig count continues to rise, up by nine to 360 for the week ending Jan. 8, but still down substantially, by 421, from a count of 781 a year ago.
When the count hit 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 Jan. 8 count includes 275 rigs targeting oil, up eight from the previous week but down 384 from 659 a year ago, 84 rigs targeting gas, up one from the previous week but down 35 from 119 a year ago, and one miscellaneous rig, unchanged from the previous week and down two from a year ago.
Twenty-two of the holes were directional, 320 were horizontal and 18 were vertical.
Alaska count up by one New Mexico (69) was up by four rigs from the previous week; Pennsylvania (21) was up by two.
Alaska (3), California (7), Oklahoma (18) and West Virginia (9) were each up by one rig.
Rig numbers were unchanged from the previous week in Colorado (6), Louisiana (43), North Dakota (11), Texas (161), Utah (3) and Wyoming (4).
The count in Ohio (4) was down by one rig from the previous week.
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with three active rigs Jan. 8, up by one from the previous week but down by four from a year ago.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by four from the previous week at 179, but down 218 from a count of 397 a year ago.
International count down by 4 In a Jan. 8 release of monthly international rig counts (a number which excludes North America) Baker Hughes said the December count of 665 was down by four rigs from November with land rigs unchanged at 509 and offshore rigs down four to 156.
The U.S. rig count - for which this release shows a monthly average - was 339 in December, up 29 from November’s average of 310 but down 465 from the December 2019 average.
The worldwide rig count, international and North America, was 1,104 in December, up by 30 from November and down 939 from 2,043 in December 2019.
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