Alaska's source for oil and gas news
Alaska's source for oil and gas news
Baker Hughes’ U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 552 on March 20, down by one from the previous week and down 41 from 593 a year ago. The domestic rig count has ranged from the 530s through the 550s since the beginning of June.
For 2025, the count peaked Feb. 28 (and again March 21) at 593, hitting its low point Aug. 29 at 526. For 2024, the count peaked March 1 (and again March 15) at 629, hitting its low point June 28 at 581. In 2023 the count peaked early in the year at 775 on Jan. 13, bottoming out Nov. 10 at 616.
A drop of 17 to 731 on May 12, 2023, was the steepest weekly drop since June of 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the count also dropped by 17 to 284 on June 5, following drops as steep as 73 rigs in one week in April. The count continued down to 251 at the end of July 2020, reaching an all-time low of 244 in mid-August 2020.
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 March 20 count includes 414 rigs targeting oil, up by two from the previous week and down 72 from 486 a year ago, with 131 rigs targeting natural gas, down by two from the previous week and up 29 from 102 a year ago, and seven miscellaneous rigs, down by one from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.
Fifty-three of the rigs reported March 20 were drilling directional wells, 485 were drilling horizontal wells and 10 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged
North Dakota (27) was up three rigs from the previous week, Oklahoma (46) was up two rigs and New Mexico (102) was up by one rig.
Colorado (12), Utah (15) and Wyoming (16) were each down two rigs week over week while Texas (233) was down by a single rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (11), California (7), Louisiana (40), Ohio (11), Pennsylvania (20) and West Virginia (8).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 11 rotary rigs active March 20, unchanged from the previous week and up by one from a year ago when the state’s count was 10.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by two from the previous week at 243 and down by 57 from 300 a year ago.
