The number of offshore oil rigs may keep dropping.

Offshore oil rigs, which averaged 570 last year, will decline to about 415 this year because of dwindling oil prices, Pennzoil President Richard J. Howe predicted. The rig count also will “bump along” at 400 for several years and not return to the boom levels of the early 1980s until 1995, he said. Pennzoil has trimmed its offshore drilling rigs to just two--one in the Gulf of Mexico’s Mobile Bay and another in the Dutch North Sea. “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had so few rigs operating,” Howe told a news conference at the annual Offshore Technology Conference. “I guess it takes a lot more guts than most of us can muster to start drilling under the circumstances.”