Update: A statement from Halliburton spokesperson Emily Mir has been added to this story.
Houston-based Halliburton Co. (NYSE: HAL) is closing its office in El Reno, Oklahoma, which will affect more than 800 jobs.
The majority of employees were offered relocation to Duncan, Oklahoma, about 75 miles south of El Reno, said Emily Mir, a spokesperson for Halliburton.
"We made this decision in response to reduced activity levels in Oklahoma and the greater Mid-Continent area," Mir said in an email.
The company filed a letter with the Oklahoma Office of Workforce Development Dec. 2 disclosing the reductions, according to media reports. Michael Queener, vice president of the MidCon area at Halliburton, announced in the letter that the El Reno field camp, located about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City, would shutter operations, which includes a dispatch command center and several hydraulic fracturing crews.
"While the majority of employees were offered relocation, Halliburton also reduced its workforce in El Reno," Mir said. "Making this decision was not easy, nor taken lightly, but unfortunately, it was necessary as we work to align our operations to reduced customer activity."
This is not the first headcount reduction for Halliburton in 2019. The oil field services giant shed about 8 percent of its North American Workforce in the second quarter. Then, in the third quarter, it reduced the headcount of its Rocky Mountain arm by about 650 people in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and North Dakota.
Although he did not explicitly indicate a trend of job cuts would continue, Halliburton CFO Lance Loeffler said at a Houston Business Journal energy panel in November that headcount reductions come as the company aims to reduce costs.
“We don’t want to stack crews today that aren’t earning their cost of capital. That’s not what we’re in business to do,” he said at the time. “We’re doing that today because that is the stark reality of what pricing has done. That is what it has forced us to do.”
The oil and gas industry has faced contractions in recent months, with 23 percent of Texas companies in that sector reporting third-quarter layoffs, according to a survey by the Dallas Federal Reserve.
Oil and gas companies are generally experiencing another wave of bankruptcies. There have been 50 bankruptcies across oil and gas upstream, services and midstream businesses through the first nine months of 2019, according to data from Haynes and Boone LLP’s latest bankruptcy report.
