Saudi Arabian Rig Counts

The other day, when I pointed to JoulesBurn's nice piece on the Haradh well count, a couple of people suggested that this meant Saudi Arabia might be struggling to maintain production generally at the current level.  That didn't seem likely to me, and this morning I went back and checked the Baker Hughes rig counts for Saudi Arabia, which currently run through February.  Indeed, it seems that Saudi Aramco is still in a post-great-recession slack-off.  I think if they were struggling to maintain production, we would see this graph going up, not down.

(There is still a debate about the meaning of the run-up in 2005-2006, with some of us thinking it was likely triggered by the need to replace declining production in exhausted sectors of established fields, and others thinking it was primarily about capacity expansion.  Clearly, one can hold an opinion anywhere on that spectrum, and the facts are not presently incontrovertible enough to allow one camp to convince the other).