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Baker Hughes US rig count up by 6 at 582
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes' U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 582 on Jan. 31, up by six from the previous week, down by 37 from 619 a year ago and up six from two weeks ago. Over the last eight weeks the rig count was unchanged in four weeks, down in three and up in one week with a loss of 13 and a gain of six, in line with the downward trend dominant since the beginning of May.
This is the lowest the domestic rotary rig count has been since December 2021.
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.
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.
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 Jan. 31 count includes 479 rigs targeting oil, up by seven from the previous week and down 20 from 499 a year ago, with 98 rigs targeting natural gas, down by one from the previous week and down 19 from 117 a year ago, and five miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up by two from a year ago.
Fifty of the rigs reported Jan. 31 were drilling directional wells, 519 were drilling horizontal wells and 13 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged New Mexico (106) was up four rigs from the previous week while North Dakota (33) and Oklahoma (45) were each up by a single rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), California (7), Colorado (9), Louisiana (29), Ohio (9), Texas (277), Utah (11), West Virginia (10) and Wyoming (19).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active Jan. 31, unchanged from the previous week and unchanged from a year ago.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by five rigs from the previous week at 303 and down by eight from 311 a year ago.
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