I ran across an interesting post on Andrew Sullivan’s site, the Daily Dish that got me to thinking about gas prices especially considering no new oil fields have been discovered since the 70’s.

Last week, rig count in the US stood at 1170. But that is a bit misleading. 78.3% of those rigs were drilling for Natural Gas. So only 241 rigs, land, offshore, deepwater included, were looking for oil. An additional 119 rigs (out of 299) were looking for oil in Canada.

By contrast, there were 1020 rigs international. Of these 792 were drilling for oil. Read more.

If this is true, we have 21.7% of our rigs looking for oil the other 78.3% looking for natural gas, what is the precentage of oil produced from those rigs? Does anyone know? I’m looking now. I guess this explains why US gas prices shoot up over night?or Maybe not. But with only 241 rigs out of 1170 looking for oil wouldn’t this affect production, pricing and what is the point of maximum production based on the number of rigs? Remember the peak oil theory? Umm