A gas flare burns at an oil well site near Sidney, Montana, US. Rigs targeting oil in the US rose by 2 to 574, after more than 100 were idled since the start of September, Baker Hughes said on its website on Friday.

Bloomberg
Houston

Drillers put rigs back to work in US oil fields after more than two months of pulling back as explorers seek to boost production so they’ll have enough cash to pay their bills.
Rigs targeting oil in the US rose by 2 to 574, after more than 100 were idled since the start of September, Baker Hughes said on its website on Friday. Natural gas rigs were trimmed by 6 to 193, bringing the total down by 4 to 767. The Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas was the only one of the four major US basins to add an oil rig. There are now 62 working there.
Some analysts shrugged off the decline as only temporary.
“I don’t think there’s much to it,” Chase Mulvehill, an analyst at Suntrust Robinson Humphrey in Atlanta said in a phone interview. “What we’re really going to have to pay attention to is the holiday season to see if guys start putting down rigs. The real declines are supposed to happen come Thanksgiving and as we get into the December month.”
Explorers are pressing their rig providers to cut rental prices lower so they can afford to keep drilling and producing more oil to boost their cash flow. America’s oil drillers have idled more than half the country’s rigs since last October as the world’s largest crude suppliers battle for market share. The crude being pumped out of US shale formations helped create a global glut that’s pushed prices down by more than 50% since June 2014.
“We have been successful at putting a few rigs to work,” said John Lindsay, chief executive officer at Helmerich & Payne Inc, one of the largest US onshore drilling contractors. “Our hope is that we could continue to put a couple of rigs to work during the rest of the quarter,” Lindsay told analysts and investors Thursday on a conference call.
Despite the cutbacks, US production has remained stubbornly high as new techniques that increase efficiency keep the oil flowing. Output rose by 25,000 barrels last week to 9.2mn bpd, according to weekly Energy Information Administration data. West Texas Intermediate, the US benchmark crude, is up about 6% since hitting the year’s low of $38.24 a barrel on August 24. It fell more than 8% last week, testing $40 on Friday.
Oil prices are trading at their lowest level since August after supplies of the fuel expanded by more than three times the number analysts forecast. Crude stockpiles have risen to a record of almost 3bn barrels because of strong production in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries and elsewhere, the International Energy Agency said in its monthly market report on Friday.
“The trend is lower, the bearishness will continue,” Jonathan Barratt, chief investment officer at Ayers Alliance Securities in Sydney, said by phone. “It’s the same story of high supply pushing the oil price lower.”
Oil is near a bottom and demand is poised to close the gap with global supplies as investments in new production decline and consumption grows, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin. US crude output, which surged to the most in more than three decades this year, deepening a collapse in prices, will retreat by about 10% in the 12-months ending in April, according to Yergin, vice chairman at IHS Inc
“We are in the bottom part of the cycle and a year from now the market will be looking different,” Yergin said. “These prices are having such a big impact on investment.”