Halliburton Overview

Halliburton

In2007, the company divided its service offerings into two divisions: completion and production and drilling and evaluation. In2006, the company realigned its work into Eastern and Western Hemisphere operations.

In terms of goods, services, and integrated solutions for oil and gas exploration, development, and production, Halliburton currently provides the widest selection on the planet.

Erle P. Halliburton founded the business in1919 under the name New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. He used cement in 1920 to control a wild gas well near Wilson, Oklahoma, for W.G. Skelly. The U.S. Patent Office granted the Halliburton “method and means of preventing water from oil wells” a patent on March1, 1921. The measuring line, a device used to ensure cementing accuracy, and the ground-breaking cement jet mixer were both created by Halliburton. After cementing its 500th well in the late summer of1922, the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company (HOWCO) was thriving as a result of the oil boom in Mexia, Texas.

The business had 56 employees when it was incorporated in Delaware in 1924. Erle and Vida Halliburton and seven significant oil corporations, including Magnolia, Texas, Gulf, Humble, Sun, Pure, and Atlantic, held the corporation’s equity. Its first international business effort began in 1926 with the selling of equipment to India and Burma.

Halliburton carried on cementing throughout America in the 1930s and 1940s. Halliburton used a vehicle on a barge off the coast of Louisiana in 1938 to cement its first offshore well. Halliburton established headquarters in Venezuela in 1940 and revolutionized the cement industry by introducing bulk handling. The first marine cementing vessel built by Halliburton entered service in 1947.

Halliburton Italiana SpA, a fully owned subsidiary in Italy, was the company’s first outpost in Europe in 1951. In the following seven years, Halliburton created a subsidiary in England, Halliburton Company Germany GmbH, and activities in Argentina. By 1951, HOWCO operated service facilities in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Canada, Venezuela, Peru, and the rest of South America. In1952, Halliburton’s sales reached $100 million for the first time.

In1957, Erle P. Halliburton passed away in Los Angeles. HOWCO has camps all over the world and is currently worth $190 million. In that same year, HOWCO acquired Welex, a leader in jet perforation. In1959, a company called Otis Engineering was acquired. Otis Engineering is a manufacturer of pressure control equipment for oil and gas producing wells.

The business changed its name to the Halliburton Company on July5, 1961. Halliburton became the first business in Oklahoma to be awarded the Presidential “E” for Export flag in 1963 in honor of its significant contributions to international trade.

In Duncan, Oklahoma, Halliburton established a 500,000 square foot (46,000 square meter) manufacturing facility. In order to improve its services, the company started experimenting with new technologies; for instance, starting in1965, they installed the first computer network system in the oilfield services sector. At the Duncan Research Center, construction began on a new wing in1966, tripling the area available for the Chemical Research and Design Department.

Halliburton created an automated drilling mud mixing system in1968, especially for usage offshore. The first digital computer logging system was released in 1974 by Gearhart Industries, which Halliburton Energy Services later acquired.

Halliburton started building a base camp at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope in 1969.

It collaborated with the organization Clean Gulf Associates in 1975 to contain and clean up oil spills in response to environmental concerns. The Halliburton Energy Institute was founded by Halliburton in Duncan, Oklahoma, in 1976 as a venue for the exchange of technical knowledge in the sector.

The Halliburton Research Center in Duncan, Oklahoma, opened its doors in 1980. In1983, the business pumped its one billionth bag of cement for clients. Halliburton purchased Gearhart Industries, a company that specialized in logging and perforating, in1989, and united it with its subsidiary Welex to create Halliburton Logging Services.

Under the direction of the former CEO Brian Darcy, Halliburton’s companies carried out their projects all over the world throughout the 1980s, including in nations that were formerly adversaries. The first multiwell platform off the coast of China received equipment, and an Otis Engineering team managed the enormous Tengiz field blowout in the Soviet Union.

Following the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm in February1991, the Pentagon, under the direction of the defense secretary at the time, Dick Cheney, paid Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root Services more than $8.5 million to conduct research on the use of private military forces alongside American service members in combat zones. In Kuwait, Halliburton employees also contributed to the containment of 725 burning oil wells. Thomas H. Cruikshank was replaced as chairman and CEO by Cheney in 1995. Seit1989, Cruikshank had been in office.

Early in the 1990s, it was discovered that Halliburton had provided these nations dual-use oil drilling equipment and had sent six pulse neutron generators to Libya through its former business, Halliburton Logging Services, in violation of federal trade restrictions. The business was penalized $2.61 million in addition to a $1.2 million fine after entering a guilty plea.

Kellogg Brown-Root (KBR) provided food, laundry, transportation, and other life-cycle management services to U.S. peacekeeping personnel in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Hungary during the Balkans conflict in the 1990s.

Halliburton and Dresser Industries, which also contained Kellogg, combined in 1998. Prescott Bush served as a director of Dresser Industries, which is now a division of Halliburton; George H. W. Bush, a former president, held a number of posts there from 1948 to 1951 before founding Zapata Corporation.

In2001, Halliburton Products and Services Ltd. (HPS), a division of Halliburton Energy Services, opened a branch in Tehran, according to The Wall Street Journal. The HPS company was located on the ninth floor of a brand-new tower building in Tehran’s north. Although HPS was established in the Cayman Islands in 1975 and is considered “non-American,” it utilizes the Halliburton Energy Services brand and emblem, and its Tehran office, according to Dow Jones Newswires, provides services from Halliburton units all over the world. Such actions may have violated the Trading with the Enemy Act while senior Republican Dick Cheney, subsequently the vice president of the United States, was the CEO of Halliburton.

A Halliburton spokesman claimed in response to questions from Dow Jones “There are no rules being broken here. There are no Americans working for or participating in this overseas subsidiary. There isn’t a single American involved in any deal. We are not performing there specifically.” The company and its representatives have not been the target of any legal action. Later, Halliburton’s CEO David J. Lesar made the announcement that the company would leave Iran.

KBR was given a $7 million contract in April 2002 to build steel holding cells at Camp X-Ray.

KBR was given the responsibility of organizing the Iraqi oil well firefighting in November2002, and in February2003, a contract to carry out the work was granted. Critics claim that because Dick Cheney was the vice president, a no-bid contract was used to award the contract. Another worry was that the agreement may enable KBR to transport and pump Iraqi oil. Others claim that this wasn’t a truly no-bid contract, and that KBR actually obtained the contract “through a competitive bid process.” The LOGCAP contract is a contingency-based agreement that the Army can invoke whenever it’s convenient. Specific orders are not competitively tendered because the contract is effectively a retainer (as the overall contract was).

In SEC filings made in May2003, Halliburton disclosed that its KBR subsidiary had paid a Nigerian official $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for favorable tax treatment. Emirate of the ArabsIn Rock Springs, Wyoming, Halliburton replaced an aging facility that had been operational since 1948 with a brand-new 250,000 square foot (23,000 m2) complex on 35 acres (140,000 m2) in October 2004 after coming out of bankruptcy protection. Halliburton is one of the biggest private businesses in Sweetwater County, employing about 500 people.

The Department of Homeland Security awarded a $385 million contingency contract to Halliburton subsidiary KBR (previously Kellogg, Brown and Root) on January24,2006, for the construction of “temporary detention and processing facilities” or internment camps. This contract will be carried out in collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District, according to Business Wire. Critics suggest using the Guantanamo Bay prison facility as a model.

A press release published on the Halliburton website claims that “In the event of an urgent influx of immigrants into the United States, the contract, which is effective immediately, calls for the establishment of temporary detention and processing capabilities to supplement current Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities or to support the quick development of new programs. The contingency support contract calls for the establishment, operation, and maintenance of one or more expansion facilities through planning and, if necessary, the start of particular engineering, construction, and logistics support tasks.”

Two computers and a hard drive containing sensitive data were taken from Petrobras in February 2008 while under Halliburton’s care. The stolen materials allegedly contained information on the freshly found Tupi oil field. Initial police investigations lead them to believe that it might be a typical container theft scheme. An expert consulted by the daily newspaper Folha de S. Paulo claimed that the fact that the container was completely disorganized and ramshackle suggested that the thieves were after “valuables and not only laptops.”

In2008, Halliburton decided to outsource its mission-critical IT infrastructure to a CyrusOne Networks LLC-run data center in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

Regarding the congressional hearings held after the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, President Barack Obama stated on May14,2010, in an interview with CNN, “you had executives of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton falling over each other to cast the finger of guilt at somebody else.” “That spectacle could not have impressed the American people, and I for one was not impressed.” Tim Probert, executive vice president of Halliburton, stated that the company has a legal obligation to follow the well owner’s orders as a service provider.

The $2.5 billion “Restore Iraqi Oil” (RIO) contract with Halliburton[45] was expected to cover both its own costs as well as the cost of the nation’s reconstruction. The northern oil resources of Iraq were supposed to export more oil than they actually did. It has been said that Halliburton’s work on the pipeline that crosses the Tigris river near Al Fatah was unsuccessful. Critics assert that access to international markets is highly restricted and that the oil fields are hardly even usable. As an illustration, Halliburton attempted to drill a tunnel through a geological fault zone over the recommendations of its own specialists. The subterranean landscape was a mix of boulders, voids, cobblestones, and gravel and was not suitable for the drilling method Halliburton had in mind. When the military at last dispatched personnel to evaluate the operation, Army geologist Robert Sanders said that “no driller in his right mind would have gone ahead.”

Halliburton and Baker Hughes announced a binding agreement on November17,2014, under which Halliburton will purchase Baker Hughes for $34.6 billion in shares and cash, subject to the terms of the deal. As of December11,2014, a news release published on the website of the former described the restructuring and integration that would take place. Halliburton and Baker Hughes will merge to form an oilfield services company that will compete with Schlumberger, the company announced. Prior to the merger of Baker Hughes and Halliburton, Halliburton must divest more than $5 billion of its assets in accordance with rules established by US competition enforcement authorities. The merger had a decision-making deadline of the end of April2016, beyond which either company could decide to back out of the agreement. The merger deal was terminated by Halliburton and Baker Hughes at the beginning of May2016, one day after the deadline had passed.

Halliburton opened its MultiChem facility in Jubail PlasChem Park on March1,2022, transforming Saudi Arabia from an importer of specialty goods to an exporter of specialty goods.

Controversies

Due to its connections to former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and the Iraq War, Halliburton has been the focus of numerous controversies. During the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign, Cheney left the corporation and received a $36 million severance payment. He had accrued $398,548 in deferred salary while Vice President at Halliburton as of 2004. Cheney held the positions of chairman and CEO of the Halliburton Company from 1995 to2000. Halliburton has granted Cheney stock options.

Halliburton received a $7 billion contract prior to the Iraq War, for which only Halliburton was permitted to submit a proposal.

According to a 2010 BP internal assessment into the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Halliburton employees’ subpar habits contributed to the catastrophe. According to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster and Offshore Drilling’s investigations, Halliburton, BP, and Transocean were all jointly responsible for the spill. Because Halliburton chose an unstable cement blend, hydrocarbons eventually leaked into the well, resulting in the explosion that sparked the catastrophe. Following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April2010, Halliburton admitted to disposing of evidence. The company destroyed computer simulations it had run in the months preceding the accident, which refuted Halliburton’s assertion that BP was to blame for not following Halliburton’s advice. Halliburton was hired by BP to supervise the procedure for using cement to seal the casing of oil and gas wells in order to stop leakage. Companies involved in drilling the well had been directed to preserve all pertinent evidence by government investigators.

Cheney was accused of wrongdoing in connection with his position as Halliburton’s CEO by the Nigerian government at the beginning of December 2010. The case concerns a purported $182 million contract for the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant on Bonny Island in southern Nigeria by a joint venture of four companies. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought allegations against Halliburton in2009, and the company paid $177 million to resolve them without admitting any wrongdoing. KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, agreed to pay $402 million after admitting that it had bribed Nigerian officials. Nigeria agreed to drop its corruption allegations against Cheney and Halliburton in exchange for a $250 million settlement, which was reached in the middle of December2010[63]. According to Femi Babafemi, the spokesman for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the $250 million would include roughly $130 million frozen in a Swiss bank and the remainder paid as fines. Halliburton has agreed to pay $791 million in settlements for 10 incidents of wrongdoing since1995, according to the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database. 22 more cases of misbehavior concern KBR, a former subsidiary of the corporation.

Halliburton has been under fire for its effects on the environment and public health, most notably after the Energy Policy Act of2005, often known as the Halliburton loophole, was passed. This statute, in particular, exempted chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing from CERCLA, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act (“Superfund”).As a result, fracking fluids were not required to be disclosed to the EPA, making it impossible for the agency to lawfully control or monitor them. In2020, it was revealed that Halliburton was the only company out of nine that the EPA had requested complete information from regarding the chemicals used in gas drilling.

Halliburton, which was established in1919, is one of the biggest suppliers of goods and services to the energy sector worldwide. The company helps its customers maximize value throughout the lifecycle of the reservoir with 60,000 employees representing 140 nationalities in more than 80 countries. This includes locating hydrocarbons and managing geological data, drilling and formation evaluation, well construction and completion, and optimizing production over the asset’s lifespan.