While global oilfield services provider Halliburton has established an office at Eccles on the East Bank of Demerara and hired local staff, the company plans to lay off some 800 workers in the United States at its El Reno operations and close its Oklahoma City office, the Associated Press (AP) yesterday reported.
A Halliburton Energy Services Inc. spokeswoman told AP that the company will provide additional information.
The Associated Press stated that it spoke with Oklahoma Office of Workforce Development spokesman, David Crow, who informed that his agency was notified of the layoffs and apparent closure of the office, effective Monday. “Crow provided a letter from Houston-based Halliburton, dated Monday that says the “mass layoff” of 808 employees is expected to be permanent and that “at this time it is expected that the facility will not remain open,” AP stated.
Out of the 808 employees expected to be laid off, Oil &Gas 360 reports that Halliburton’s filing shows that more than a third worked with acids used in the hydraulic fracturing process and nearly a tenth performed cementing work for oil wells. It pointed out that the decision comes at a time when the US$50 per barrel crude oil price has resulted in a shale slump with lower drilling and completion activity across the United States and Canada.
Noted too was that the Houston, Texas, headquartered company reduced 8 per cent of its North American workforce during the second quarter of this year and cut another 650 jobs in four western states in October.
The layoffs and operation scale-down in the U.S are in direct contrast to the company’s Guyana operations; when the company began assembling its workforce here in 2017 it had said that it was here for the long haul and had plans to train locals at the very Oklahoma City office.
Since that time, it has grown and established a large office at Industrial Site, Eccles.
“The Exxon local content—what they are looking for—along with your government’s local content and what they are looking for, falls right in with what we are looking for. We have operations in 122 locations around the world. It is always better to come in and train the local people. It does take a while for oil and gas because oil and gas is complicated. It is not something where you can just pull in people and they are trained within months. It actually takes years for you to become the engineer we need you to be,” then Country Manager Gerald Leboeuf had explained.
“It takes time. The complication is on the science side basically. This is all science, drilling and completing wells and working at the depths we are. We are looking at almost two miles from the surface down to the sea bed, working with the rig. As for our local content, our plan is to hire as per our tendering. We are actually in the tendering mode with Exxon to see what we are going to win. We are hoping to win a good bid and we will work on local content and see what we can actually bring in, in terms of training. The contracts we have now, if we were to actually hold those contracts and we win those contracts, by yearend we could have about pretty close to 25 persons possibly hired; Guyanese. So the short term for us is, if we get tenders, to try to hire people and get them trained. The training will be in Trinidad, some will be in Houston, Texas and some could be Oklahoma,” he added.
And only recently, the company signed a US$2 million Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Guyana that will see the monies being used in a number of areas, such as purchasing needed laboratory equipment, staff development and software programme support for teaching. The company also pledged to continue support.
That deal was one of the biggest contributions here to education by a tier one ExxonMobil contractor.
“We are very proud to be part of this business with you. In addition to the monetary award, our intention is now to transfer the knowledge, the technology and we are fully committed to this country and the community,” Franco Delano, Halliburton’s Area Manager for the Region, had said at the signing.
Founded in 1919 and headquartered in Houston, Halliburton has more than 60,000 employees in 40 nations. The company made a US$1.66 billion profit on US$24 billion of revenue during 2018.
