Rig counts are continuing to drop in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, from which drillers in Weld County extract oil and gas.

As of last Friday, rig counts in the DJ Basin, which covers all of Weld, plus parts of Wyoming and Nebraska, dropped by six to 42.

That’s down 21 percent in the last year, according to numbers from the Baker Hughes rig summary, which is updated weekly.

Of all the rigs that were put down in Colorado, all 11 came out of the DJ Basin, meaning they all came out of Weld.

Rig counts are essential barometers for oil and gas well activity in oil fields.

The fewer the wells being drilled, the fewer workers are on the job, and the less production, from which taxing districts, including local governments, earn less money.

Rig counts have been lessening in the last few years as a matter of course, however. Rigs are getting more efficient – getting better at their jobs and drilling wells faster.

Last year at this time, Colorado had 60 rigs actively drilling wells, 42 of which were in the DJ Basin.

At the end of December, Weld County had 51 rigs running, according to numbers provided by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Those were the latest numbers available through the COGCC.

According to Bloomberg, last week’s U.S. rig count for rigs targeting oil dropped the most since 2011.

The total U.S. count fell by 98 to 1,358, Baker Hughes reported. Half the decline was in the Permian Basin of Texas and Mexico, the biggest U.S. oil field, Bloomberg stated.

Bloomberg reported the “record pullback in U.S. oil drilling sidelined more than 400 rigs within two months, erasing tens of thousands of jobs and shrinking estimated exploration and production spending by more than $116 billion.”

Texas rigs as a whole dropped 29 percent over the year, while North Dakota rigs dropped 27.4 percent to 123 as of Feb. 13. Wyoming lost 12 rigs, or 23.5 percent in the last week.