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Baker Hughes US rig count gains 4 to 623
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Baker Hughes' U.S. rotary drilling rig count was 623 for the week ending Feb. 9, up by four rigs from 619 the previous week, and down by 148 from 761 a year ago. The rig count increased in four of the last eight weeks and decreased in four, with a gain of eight balanced against a loss of eight over the period, bucking a downward trend dominant since the beginning of May.
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 before beginning a slow climb upward.
As 2023 reached its end, the count hovered in the 620s for more than a month with the Dec. 29 count of 622 down from a high of 775 on Jan. 13, 2023. The high for 2022 was 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 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 Feb. 9 count includes 499 rigs targeting oil, unchanged from the previous week and down 110 from 609 a year ago, with 121 rigs targeting natural gas, up by four from the previous week and down 29 from 150 a year ago, and three miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and up one from a year ago.
Fifty-one of the rigs reported Feb. 9 were drilling directional wells, 560 were drilling horizontal wells and 12 were drilling vertical wells.
Alaska rig count unchanged Louisiana (45) and New Mexico (101) were each up the three rigs from the previous week.
Pennsylvania (23) was up by two rigs and California (6) was up by a single rig.
Texas (301) was down two rigs week over week and Oklahoma (41) and Utah (12) were each down by a single rig.
Rig counts in other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (10), Colorado (16), Kansas (2), North Dakota (32), Ohio (13), West Virginia (8) and Wyoming (11).
Baker Hughes shows Alaska with 10 rotary rigs active Feb. 9, unchanged from the previous week and up by three from a year ago when the count was seven. Nine of the Alaska rigs were onshore, unchanged from the previous week, with one rig working offshore, also unchanged from the previous week.
The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by two from the previous week at 313 and down by 39 from 352 a year ago.
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