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The story
Founded by Erle P. Halliburton in 1919, in Dallas.1
Early history (as HOWCO)
The company was started in 1919 by Erle P. Halliburton as the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company.
In 1920, he brought a wild gas well under control, using cement, for W.G. Skelly, near Wilson, Oklahoma. On March 1, 1921, the Halliburton "method and means of excluding water from oil wells" was assigned a patent from the U.S. Patent Office. Halliburton invented the revolutionary cement jet mixer, to eliminate hand-mixing of cement, and the measuring line, a tool used to guarantee cementing accuracy. By 1922, the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company (HOWCO) was prospering from the Mexia, Texas oil boom, having cemented its 500th well in late summer.
In 1924, the company was incorporated in Delaware, with 56 people on its payroll. The stock of the corporation was owned by Erle and Vida Halliburton and by seven major oil companies: Magnolia, Texas, Gulf, Humble, Sun, Pure and Atlantic.
In 1926, its first foreign venture began with sale of equipment to Burma and India.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Halliburton continued cementing across America. In 1938, Halliburton cemented its first offshore well using a truck on a barge off the Louisiana coast. In 1940, Halliburton opened offices in Venezuela and introduced bulk handling of cementing to the industry. In 1947, the Halliburton first marine cementing vessel went into service.
In 1951, Halliburton first appeared in Europe as Halliburton Italiana SpA, a wholly owned subsidiary in Italy. Over the next seven years, Halliburton launched Halliburton Company Germany GmbH, set up operations in Argentina and established a subsidiary in England. By 1951, HOWCO had service centers operating in Canada, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Halliburton revenues topped $100 million for the first time in 1952.
Erle P. Halliburton died in Los Angeles in 1957. HOWCO is at this time worth $190 million with camps all over the world. The same year, HOWCO purchased Welex, which pioneered jet perforation. Otis Engineering, an oil field service and equipment company specializing in manufacturing pressure control equipment for oil and gas producing wells, was acquired in 1959.
As Halliburton
On July 5, 1961, the company changed its name to the Halliburton Company. In 1963, Halliburton was the first company in Oklahoma to receive the Presidential "E" (for Export) flag in recognition of notable contributions to foreign trade.
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Halliburton opened a 500,000 sq ft (46,000 m2) manufacturing center in Duncan, Oklahoma, in 1964. The company began to experiment with new technologies to help their services – for example, beginning in 1965 a pilot operation of a computer network system – the first such installation in the oilfield services industry. In 1966, workers broke ground for a new wing at the Research Center in Duncan that tripled the available space for the Chemical Research and Design Department.
In 1968, an automated mixing system for drilling mud was developed by Halliburton, primarily for use offshore. Gearhart Industries (acquired by Halliburton Energy Services in 1989) introduced the first digital computer logging system in 1974.
In 1969, Halliburton began construction of a base camp at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope.
In 1975, it responded to environmental concerns by working with the nonprofit Clean Gulf Associates to contain and clean up oil spills. In 1976, Halliburton established the Halliburton Energy Institute in Duncan, Oklahoma, to provide an industry forum for disseminating technical information.
In 1980, Halliburton Research Center opened in Duncan, Oklahoma. The company's billionth sack of cement for customers was pumped in 1983. In 1989, Halliburton acquired logging and perforating specialist company Gearhart Industries and combined it with its subsidiary Welex to form Halliburton Logging Services.
Throughout the 1980s, Halliburton's subsidiaries continued their projects around the world (under management of former CEO Brian Darcy) even in countries once considered enemies. Equipment was provided for the first multiwell platform offshore China, and an Otis Engineering team controlled a gigantic Tengiz field blowout in the Soviet Union.
1990s
Following the end of Operation Desert Storm in February 1991, the Pentagon, led by then defense secretary Dick Cheney, paid Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root Services over $8.5 million to study the use of private military forces with American soldiers in combat zones. Halliburton crews also helped bring 725 burning oil wells under control in Kuwait.
In 1995, Cheney replaced Thomas H. Cruikshank, as chairman and CEO. Cruikshank had served since 1989.
In the early 1990s, Halliburton was found to be in violation of federal trade barriers in Iraq and Libya, having sold these countries dual-use oil drilling equipment and, through its former subsidiary, Halliburton Logging Services, sending six pulse neutron generators to Libya. After having pleaded guilty, the company was fined $1.2 million, with another $2.61 million in penalties.
During the Balkans conflict in the 1990s, Kellogg Brown-Root (KBR) supported U.S. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Hungary with food, laundry, transportation, and other life-cycle management services.
In 1998, Halliburton merged with Dresser Industries, which included Kellogg. Prescott Bush was a director of Dresser Industries, which is now part of Halliburton; his son, former president George H. W. Bush, worked for Dresser Industries in several positions from 1948 to 1951, before he founded Zapata Corporation.
2000s
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2001 that a subsidiary of Halliburton Energy Services called Halliburton Products and Services Ltd. (HPS) opened an office in Tehran. The company, HPS, operated on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. Although HPS was incorporated in the Cayman Islands in 1975 and is "non-American", it shares both the logo and name of Halliburton Energy Services and, according to Dow Jones Newswires, offers services from Halliburton units worldwide through its Tehran office. Such behavior, undertaken while senior Republican (later U.S. vice president) Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, may have violated the Trading with the Enemy Act. A Halliburton spokesman, responding to inquiries from Dow Jones, said "This is not breaking any laws. This is a foreign subsidiary and no U.S. person is involved in this. No U.S. person is facilitating any transaction. We are not performing directly in that country." No legal action has been taken against the company or its officials. Later, David J. Lesar, Halliburton's chief executive, announced that Halliburton would withdraw from Iran.
In April 2002, KBR was awarded a $7 million contract to construct steel holding cells at Camp X-Ray.
In November 2002, KBR was tasked to plan oil well firefighting in Iraq, and in February 2003 was issued a contract to conduct the work. Critics contend that it was a no-bid contract, awarded due to Dick Cheney's position as vice president. Concern was also expressed that the contract could allow KBR to pump and distribute Iraqi oil. Others contend, however, that this was not strictly a no-bid contract, and was invoked under a contract that KBR won "in a competitive bid process." The contract, referred to as LOGCAP, is a contingency-based contract that is invoked at the convenience of the Army. Because the contract is essentially a retainer, specific orders are not competitively bid (as the overall contract was).
In May 2003, Halliburton revealed in SEC filings that its KBR subsidiary had paid a Nigerian official $2.4 million in bribes in order to receive favorable tax treatment., In October 2004, after emerging from the bankruptcy protection, Halliburton opened a new 250,000-square-foot (23,000 m2) facility on 35 acres (140,000 m2), replacing an older facility that opened in 1948, in Rock Springs, Wyoming. With over 500 employees, Halliburton is one of the largest private employers in Sweetwater County.
On January 24, 2006, Halliburton's subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) announced that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build "temporary detention and processing facilities" or internment camps. According to Business Wire, this contract will be executed in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. Critics point to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as a possible model. According to a press release posted on the Halliburton website, "The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities."
In February 2008, a hard disk and two computers containing classified information were stolen from Petrobras while in Halliburton's custody. Allegedly, the content inside the stolen material was data on the recently discovered Tupi oil field. Initial police inquiries suggest that it could be a common container theft operation. The container was a ramshackle in complete disorder indicating that thieves were after "valuables and not only laptops," said an expert consulted by the daily newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
In 2008, Halliburton agreed to outsource its mission-critical information technology infrastructure to a Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex data center operated by CyrusOne Networks LLC.
On May 14, 2010, President Barack Obama said in an interview with CNN that "you had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else" when referring to the congressional hearings held during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. "The American people could not have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn't." According to Tim Probert, executive vice president of Halliburton, "Halliburton, as a service provider to the well owner, is contractually bound to comply with the well owner's instructions".
It was anticipated that Halliburton's $2.5 billion "Restore Iraqi Oil" (RIO) contract would pay for itself as well as for reconstruction of the entire country. Plans called for more oil to be exported from Iraq's northern oil fields than actually occurred. Halliburton's work on the pipeline crossing the Tigris river at Al Fatah has been called a failure. Critics claim that the oil fields are barely usable and access to international markets is severely limited. As an example, against the advice of its own experts, Halliburton attempted to dig a tunnel through a geological fault zone. The underground terrain was a jumble of boulders, voids, cobblestones, and gravel and not appropriate for the kind of drilling Halliburton planned. "No driller in his right mind would have gone ahead," said Army geologist Robert Sanders when the military finally sent people to inspect the work. A report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that only 28% of the required drilling had been completed when the $75 million marked for the project was spent.
Proposed acquisition of Baker Hughes
On November 17, 2014, Halliburton and Baker Hughes jointly announced a definitive agreement under which Halliburton would, subject to the conditions set forth in the agreement, acquire Baker Hughes in a stock and cash transaction valued at $34.6 billion. A press release made available on the former's website, as at December 11, 2014 detailed the restructuring in the integration to follow. The firm announced it would acquire Baker Hughes for around $35 billion in cash and stock, creating an oilfield services company that aims to compete with Schlumberger. Prior to the merger of Baker Hughes and Halliburton, Halliburton must divest over $5 billion of its assets according to the regulations created by US competition enforcement authorities. The merger had a deadline of the end of April 2016 after which, if a decision had not been made, both companies could walk away from the deal if they chose. At the beginning of May 2016, the day after the deadline expired, Halliburton and Baker Hughes announced the termination of the merger agreement.
Chemical plant in Saudi Arabia
On March 1, 2022, Halliburton inaugurated its MultiChem facility in Jubail PlasChem Park, Saudi Arabia. Manufacturing a broad range of chemicals for oil and gas industries, the move is expected to allow Saudi Arabia to pivot from its role as an importer of specialty products to an exporter in the region.
From Wikipedia’s article on Halliburton, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.8