Oil Prices Rise Amid Further Rig Count Decline
The number of oil and gas rigs has fallen by 5 this week in the US markets according to Baker Hughes, since rigs were lost last week also.
The total number of active oil rigs in the US have fallen by 4 which leaves the total to now stand at 784. The number of active rigs is now only 172 and miscellaneous rigs have risen by 1. A combined count of all oil and gas rigs now stands at 958 for this week, with 79 oil rigs seeing closure since the year began. Natural gas rigs have declined by 17 since last year, and the combined number of closed rigs for both oil and gas is now 96 for the year.
In the last one year, the number of rigs has reduced from 858 being active and 784 as of now. Gas rigs have reduced from 187 to 172 this week. It has been an exciting week for oil prices which rose mid-week on the basis of outages of crude oil production in the US gulf of Mexico because of the threat of a tropical storm coming to head. Increasing conflicts in the Saudi have also factored into the rising prices of oil as one British oil tanker was subjected to harassment in the Strait of Hormouz by Iranian Guard boats.
Prices rose to $60.34 which is $3 more than it was last week per barrel. The Brent benchmark traded up on the day as well by $0.29 at $66.81 which is $2 more than it was last week for one barrel.
US production has also increased in the week which ended on the 5th of July to 100,000 bpd less than the all-time high of 12.4 million bpd. Canada has also seen a decline by 3 in this week, and 4 in the last. Their oil rigs have declined by 54 in total since last year. Gas rigs have declined by 26.
