Saudi Arabia is adding more rigs to its drilling fleet despite the fall in oil prices, Rueters has reported.
Excluding non-U.S.-registered rigs such as Chinese or Russian, last month Saudi rig count totaled 155, up from 150 in January and 146 in December, according to data from OPEC and U.S. oil services company Baker Hughes.
Since 2010, the number of U.S.-registered rigs operating in the Kingdom has doubled from 67.
Saudi Arabia is looking beyond the lower oil prices to a time when industry could be short on supply, analysts say.
“You need to drill more wells if you are producing 10mn barrels per day and maintaining your spare capacity,” said Sadad al-Husseini, a former senior executive at Aramco and now an energy consultant.
“It is also a natural phenomenon in the oil business, that the more you produce, the more you deplete your reserves and the more rapidly your field capacity declines. You need to drill more wells more frequently, simply to maintain production capacity.”
Earlier in March Amin Nasser, Saudi Aramco’s senior vice president for upstream operations, said Aramco had yet to decide whether to increase the rig number in 2015 from the 212 currently in use.
Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco used a record-high 210 oil and gas rigs in 2014, up from around 150 in 2013, 140 in 2012 and some 100 in 2011, according to previous industry estimates, Reuters has reported.
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