A comment by Mr George Kaplan on another blog . We know him so no need to check veracity .

'' I have been looking at the Baker Hughes active drilling rig numbers and they show quite a marked (and accelerating) drop in international (i.e. non USA or Canada) oil rigs since April last year. All continents are affected but the Middle East might show slightly the largest proportional fall. This would support an expected rising drop in global production from the second half of 2025 onwards.

Active oil rigs peaked at 1080 in mid 2014 when prices were high and the industry went a bit bonkers, they dropped to the 830s just before the Covid crash then hit a low of 490 at the end of 2020 before recovering to 742 last April, but have now fallen to 671 (dropping about 10 rigs a month but steepening). The numbers don’t include Iran or former USSR states but I would expect these to be at least as bad, if not worse, as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have few oil development opportunities left and sanctions are hitting Russia and Iran. The numbers don’t differentiate between development and exploration wells but exploration has been slowly fading for over a decade and would not explain this fall. Oil price may play a part – the way contracts work the price at least six months to a year before would be the most influential and prices were falling from over 90 dollars in September 2023, but usually large oil companies, which would be responsible for most of these rigs, take a longer view. With discovered fields getting smaller wells are gradually getting less productive, although moving to deeper water complicates things, so to some extent more rigs would be needed to maintain production but it’s difficult to see the effect clearly because of the long time lags during development projects.

Active international gas rigs have been constant over 2024 at around 190.