The booming Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico continued to add active drilling rigs this week, but that growth was largely offset by small declines in other parts of the country.
The Permian added four oil rigs, but that was counterbalanced by losses elsewhere. The overall rig count grew by just one rig drilling for natural gas, while the oil rig count remained flat.
Texas saw a net gain of two rigs, while New Mexico added three. But Louisiana, Colorado, North Dakota, Ohio and Alaska all declined by a single rig, according to weekly data collected by Houston energy services firm Baker Hughes, a GE company.
There are now 844 rigs drilling for oil with more than half of them – 467 – situated in the Permian. There are exactly 200 gas-seeking rigs and two miscellaneous rigs, creating a total rig count of 1,046, the highest count since March 2015.
The total count is up from an all-time low of 404 rigs in May 2016.
The next most active area after the Permian is South Texas’ Eagle Ford shale with 77 rigs and then Oklahoma’s Cana-Woodford shale with 72 rigs. Texas is home to 525 rigs overall – just more than half of the nation’s total – while Oklahoma is second with 138 rigs. New Mexico is next with 92 rigs.
Despite this week’s jump, the oil rig count is down 48 percent from its peak of 1,609 in October 2014, before oil prices began plummeting. However, rigs today are able to drill more wells than before and to deeper depths to produce more oil and gas. That’s largely why the U.S. is producing record volumes of both crude oil and natural gas.
This article first appeared on the Houston Chronicle – an Energy Voice content partner. For more from the Houston Chronicle click here.