The Baker Hughes North American Rotary Rig Count wallowed in relative obscurity among the world’s business writers for decades. The Hughes in Baker Hughes is the original Hughes Tool Company, inventor of the tri-cone rotary rock bit. The company started accumulating this data because every operating drilling rig was a potential customer. That this weekly report might one day move the needle on North American oil prices with every vacillation was never surely never anticipated. The fact Baker Hughes still calls drilling rigs “rotary” highlights its antiquity. Thanks in large part to Hughes bits, rotary drilling had rendered cable tool rigs all by obsolete by the 1940s. Even more perplexing is today rigs drill horizontals primarily with mud motors, not by rotating the drill string. The first entry nowadays is July 17, 1987, utterly meaningless because of so many changes in rigs, bits and penetration rates. The U.S. Oil […]