OK rig count plummets

Oklahoma's rig count decreased by 10 this week to 66 while the number of working rigs also fell nationwide, Baker Hughes reported Friday.

This week's national working rig count is 868, down 18, week over week. This week's number of working rigs i s off 185 from the 1,053 that were drilling a year ago. The number of rigs drilling for oil declined by 14 to 719, while the number of rigs drilling for natural gas fell to 148, a decline of five. A miscellaneous rig also is operating this week.

In Oklahoma, the count was 76 a week ago and 136 a year ago. The number of rigs working in the Cana Woodford basin declined by three, to 36.

The most active basins this week, Baker Hughes said, are the Permian in west Texas and southeast New Mexico at 417, the south Texas Eagle Ford at 63, the Williston at 53 and the Marcellus and Haynesville shales at 50, each.

Unemployment steady

Oklahoma' s unemployment rate for August remained at 3.2%, data released Friday by the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission showed.

Data collected through a survey of employers showed employment declined during the month by 8,700 jobs to 1,695,300. It also showed the estimated number of available jobs still remained higher than in August 2018, and data also showed average weekly earnings for the private sector were up 5.4 % year over year to $869.58. The number of Oklahomans that were unemployed a year ago was 57,650, when t he state's unemployment rate was 3.1%. Officials said August is the first time since December 2016 that a month' s unemployment percentage was higher than the same month the year before.

“A monthly decline of 8,700 jobs is unusual,” Lynn Gray, the commission' s director of economic research and analysis, stated in the release .“In fact, one would have to go back to the waning days of the Great Recession to find a worse month.”

Gray also stated, however, that he expects further revisions likely will show very little movement in the number of available jobs this summer.