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Baker Hughes US rig count down 1 at 592
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes' U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 592 on March 28, down by one from the previous week, down by 29 from 621 a year ago and unchanged from two weeks ago. Over the last eight weeks the rig count was up in five weeks, down in two and unchanged in one with a combined gain of 12 against a loss of two.
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 March 28 count includes 484 rigs targeting oil, down by two from the previous week and down 22 from 506 a year ago, with 103 rigs targeting natural gas, up by one from the previous week and down nine from 112 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 March 28 were drilling directional wells, 529 were drilling horizontal wells and 13 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged Ohio (10) was up by one rig from the previous week.
New Mexico (101) and Pennsylvania (14) were each down by a single rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), California (8), Colorado (8), Louisiana (30), North Dakota (32), Oklahoma (53), Texas (280), Utah (12), West Virginia (11) and Wyoming (21).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active March 28, unchanged from the previous week and down by four from a year ago when the state's count was 14.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was down by three from the previous week at 297 and down by 19 from 316 a year ago.
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