"Walking Rigs" -- From The Houston Chronicle -- January, 2014

A reader mentioned "walking rigs" in a recent comment.

The reader linked this SeekingAlpha article from 2019 with regard to what they are doing in the Utica. 

This is a nice article, from The Houston Chronicle for newbies (and maybe also for some us older folks, LOL). I'm sure the article will eventually disappear or end up behind a pay wall. This was published back on January 18, 2014. Archived.

The article begins:

Highly specialized mobile rigs are literally walking over the oil patch's collection of aging equipment - tamping down sales and profits in a burst of efficiency that's making some drillers victims of their own success.

Large oil field services companies deploy the pricey machines called walking rigs to grab customers from midsize drillers that have to stretch to afford replacing their drilling armadas with the new-generation gear.

But the market is getting tighter for drillers large and small, as producers embrace walking rigs - so-called for the massive mechanical feet that let them move among well sites - and other technologies that let them drill more wells and harvest more oil while spending less on oil field services.

Baker Hughes recently reported a 9 percent rise in the number of wells the average U.S. land drilling rig produced in the fourth quarter (2013), compared with the same period a year ago (2012).