Drilling activity picked up slightly this week in South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale and in Oklahoma while the nation’s overall rig count stayed relatively flat.
The number of rigs drilling for crude oil or natural gas grew by one rig this week, with a net gain of two oil rigs and a lost of one seeking just gas.
Texas added one net rig for the week with the Eagle Ford picking up two and West Texas’ booming Permian Basin losing one rig.
The only states gaining or losing multiple rigs were Oklahoma with two additions and Louisiana, which lost two, according to weekly data collected by Houston energy services firm Baker Hughes, a GE company.
The small adjustments come at a time when oil prices have fallen on news last week that Saudi Arabia and Russia are leading a push to increase their oil production later this year, in part to keep prices from rising too high and slowing global economic growth. The U.S. oil benchmark was hovering above $66 a barrel Friday, while there’s a growing gap between it and the European North Sea benchmark, which is trading at about $77 a barrel.
There are now 861 rigs drilling for oil in the U.S. with more than half of them – 477 – situated in the Permian. There are 197 gas-seeking rigs and two miscellaneous rigs, creating a total rig count of 1,060, the highest count since March 2015.
The next most active area after the Permian is South Texas’ Eagle Ford shale with 80 rigs and then Oklahoma’s Cana-Woodford shale with 76 rigs. Texas is home to 535 rigs overall – just more than half of the nation’s total – while Oklahoma is second with 142 rigs. New Mexico is next with 90 rigs.
Despite this week’s jump, the oil rig count is down 46 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.