Gasoline supplies at a 42 month low; natural gas supplies still 16.5% lower than a year ago; offshore Alaska drilling resumes; Commenter Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666 This Week’s Rig Count Number of drilling rigs active in the US increased for the 40th time out of the past 47 weeks during the week ending August 13th, but was still down by 36.9% from the pre-pandemic rig count….Baker Hughes reported that the total count of rotary rigs running in the US increased by nine to 500 rigs this past week, which was also up by 256 rigs from the pandemic hit 244 rigs that were in use as of the August 14th report of 2020, but was still 1,429 fewer rigs than the shale era high of 1,929 drilling rigs that were deployed on November 21st of 2014, which was a
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Gasoline supplies at a 42 month low; natural gas supplies still 16.5% lower than a year ago; offshore Alaska drilling resumes; Commenter Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666
This Week’s Rig Count
Number of drilling rigs active in the US increased for the 40th time out of the past 47 weeks during the week ending August 13th, but was still down by 36.9% from the pre-pandemic rig count….Baker Hughes reported that the total count of rotary rigs running in the US increased by nine to 500 rigs this past week, which was also up by 256 rigs from the pandemic hit 244 rigs that were in use as of the August 14th report of 2020, but was still 1,429 fewer rigs than the shale era high of 1,929 drilling rigs that were deployed on November 21st of 2014, which was a week before OPEC began to flood the global oil market in an attempt to put US shale out of business….
Number of rigs drilling for oil was up by 10 to 397 oil rigs this week, after rising by 2 oil rigs the prior week, and it’s now 225 more oil rigs than were running a year ago, while it’s less than a quarter of the recent high of 1609 rigs that were drilling for oil on October 10th, 2014….at the same time, the number of drilling rigs targeting natural gas bearing formations was was down by one to 102 natural gas rigs, which was still up by 32 natural gas rigs from the 70 natural gas rigs that were drilling during the same week a year ago, but still just 6.4% of the modern era high of 1,606 rigs targeting natural gas that were deployed on September 7th, 2008….in addition to oil and gas rigs, a horizontal rig that Baker Hughes classifies as “miscellaneous’ is drilling in Kern county California, while a year ago there were no such “miscellaneous’ rigs reported to be active…
TGulf of Mexico rig count was down by one to 13 rigs this week, with 12 of those rigs drilling for oil in Louisiana’s offshore waters and one drilling for oil in the Alaminos Canyon offshore from Texas….that was the same number of rigs that were drilling in the Gulf a year ago, when 10 Gulf rigs were drilling for oil offshore from Louisiana and three were deployed for oil in Texas waters….in addition to those Gulf of Mexico rigs, this week we also had a vertical rig start drilling for natural gas off the shore of the Kenai peninsula in Alaska, which is the first offshore Alaska drilling in almost two years; as a result, the national offshore rig count is now 14, up from 13 offshore rigs a year ago..
In addition to those rigs offshore, we now have two rigs drilling through inland bodies of water in Louisiana this week. whereas there were no such “inland waters” rigs running a year ago…the new “inland waters” startup is a rig drilling for oil in the Haynesville shale through a lake in DeSoto parish in the northwestern corner of the state, just south of Shreveport, while we also continue to have a rig drilling through an inland body of water in Terrebonne Parish of southern Louisiana…
Count of active horizontal drilling rigs was up by 7 to 456 horizontal rigs this week, which was more than double the 211 horizontal rigs that were in use in the US on August 14th of last year, but was less than a third of the record of 1372 horizontal rigs that were deployed on November 21st of 2014…..in addition, the vertical rig count was up by 2 to 17 vertical rigs this week, and those were also up by 4 from the 13 vertical rigs that were operating during the same week a year ago….on the other hand, the directional rig count was unchanged at 27 directional rigs this week, and those were still up by 3 from the 24 directional rigs that that were in use on August 14th of 2020….
Details on this week’s changes in drilling activity by state and by major shale basin are shown in our screenshot below of that part of the rig count summary pdf from Baker Hughes that gives us those changes…the first table below shows weekly and year over year rig count changes for the major oil & gas producing states, and the table below that shows the weekly and year over year rig count changes for the major US geological oil and gas basins…in both tables, the first column shows the active rig count as of August 13th, the second column shows the change in the number of working rigs between last week’s count (August 6th) and this week’s (August 13th) count, the third column shows last week’s August 6th active rig count, the 4th column shows the change between the number of rigs running on Friday and the number running on the Friday before the same weekend of a year ago, and the 5th column shows the number of rigs that were drilling at the end of that reporting week a year ago, which in this week’s case was the 14th of August, 2020…
