The weekly Baker Hughes Rig Count for North America and the International monthly rig count is out. In the charts below the monthly data is through February 2015 and the weekly data is as of March 6th.
World Rig Count, counting oil, gas and miscellaneous rigs are down 684 rigs over the last three months. The annual spikes you here are caused by Canada.
Removing the seasonal Canadian spikes gives you a better picture of what is happening to the world rig count.
Baker Hughes publishes a weekly oil and gas rig count by producing basin. I have created charts of all the most productive basins in order that we can see where oil and gas rigs are increasing or decreasing. Their historic rig count, by basin, goes back 4 years.
It needs to be noted that Baker Hugs does not count rigs that are not actively drilling. Rigs that are “Moving In, Rigging Up” are not counted in the Baker Hughes count though they are counted by some others including the North Dakota Industrial Commission.
All rig counts are of Friday, February 27, 2015.
But first, total US weekly rig count. The oil rig count stands at 986, down 623 from a high of 1,609 in October. The gas rig count stands at 280, down 656 rigs from the high of 935 in October of 2011. However this data base goes back only 4 years. The all time high for gas rigs was 1,606 in September of 2008. The 1,609 oil rig count in October 2014 was an all time high for oil rigs. That record is valid only back to the days when Baker Hughes began separate stats for oil and gas rigs however.
Eagle Ford oil rigs currently stand at 136, down from a high 214 in April 2014. Gas rig count is 21, down from 95 in October 2011.
The EIA has published their Petroleum Supply Monthly with all US production numbers through December 2014. The chart below shows the largest changes in December and Yearly production. Almost every state had a production increase. The largest decliner was Wyoming, down 7,000 bpd. Below are the biggest gainers and the amount of their production increase in thousand barrels per day for December and the whole year.
| December | 2014 | |
| US | 187 | 1366 |
| Texas | 49 | 684 |
| North Dakota | 39 | 297 |
| GOM | 68 | 157 |
The Gulf of Mexico was up 68,000 bpd in December but was down 56,000 bpd in November. The EIA had great hopes for the GOM expecting it to hit 2 million barrels per day in 2016. I don’t think that is going to happen. GOM production now stands at 1,441,000 bpd
Alaska’s decline seems to be slowing down slightly. They are now at 520,000 bpd.
I have been supplied an Excel spreadsheet of all North Dakota wells back to 2006, thanks to Enno Peters and Dennis Coyne. I only used the data back to 2007 however. This is a wealth of information for if we want to know how many wells came on line in a given month, we simply count them. We are given the monthly production data for each month. And since we have the monthly production data we can very easily figure the decline rate of each well, or any group of wells for any month or year.
A note on the data. The first month data was almost always for a partial month. Sometimes the well came on line near the first of the month and sometimes near the end of the month. To get around this problem I have started with the second month, which is the first full month, and used that month as the first month of all my data. All data and charts below include all North Dakota wells, not just the Bakken.
Production per well has gradually increased each year. 2014 was the highest first month production but also the highest decline rate. Note that on the first month 2014 production is 29 barrels per day above 2013 1st month and 131 barrels per day above 2008 1st month. But the 2014 10th month was 7 bpd below the 2013 10th month. And by the 13th month only 7 barrels per day separated the 2008 data and the 2013 data.
Bottom line is, though the new wells produce more, they decline a lot faster.
Barrels per day per well, for the entire year, discarding the first partial month and measuring the 2nd through 13th month, averaged 230 BPD for 2013 and 241 BPD for 2014. The first-year barrels per day per well has increased every year except for 2012.
Texas has released Oil & Gas Production Data Query with its (incomplete) production numbers for December 2014. The numbers were quite surprising.
The last data for all Texas data is December 2014. The EIA data is through November. The Oil data is in barrels per day.
Though the data is incomplete, we can still get some idea what oil production was in Texas in December. Total, C+C incomplete, production numbers for December was up over 133,000 barrels per day over the November incomplete data. Of course this number will change but it is very significant. Why would Texas production numbers jump to over 2.5 times their usual number in December?
Texas crude only was up 109.4 thousand barrels per day according to the Texas RRC.