Halliburton

Origin and growth

Company founder Erle P. Halliburton learned how cement can be used to protect and seal oil-well bores while employed by the Perkins Oil Well Cementing Co. in California in 1916. He was soon dismissed from that company, supposedly for changing procedures without authorization, and eventually found his way to Burkburnett, Texas, where oil was discovered in 1918. The following year he formed the New Method Oil Well Cementing Co. and offered its services to drillers. In 1920 New Method became Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co. (HOWCO), and it soon established headquarters in Duncan, Oklahoma.

Erle Halliburton was an innovative technician who devised and patented many improvements to the oil-well cementing process. One of his earliest and most important inventions was the jet mixer, a truck-mounted machine for mixing water and lime to make the cement used in the wells. As the American petroleum industry grew, Erle Halliburton’s patents made HOWCO an indispensable part of it. In need of additional capital to finance expansion, Halliburton incorporated his company in 1924 and brought in several large petroleum businesses as joint owners. (HOWCO did not offer its stock to the public until 1948.) The company made its first overseas sales in 1926, when it sold cementing units to an English firm for use in Burma (now Myanmar). In the 1930s HOWCO opened research laboratories and increased the range of services it provided. The company deployed a barge-mounted cementing rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 1938, thus establishing itself in offshore services, which eventually became a major segment of the petroleum industry. It established a presence on the West Coast in 1940 by purchasing Perkins Oil Well Cementing, the company where Erle Halliburton had once worked. HOWCO opened its first South American office, in Venezuela, in the same year and its first European office, in Italy, in 1951.

In 1949 the company acquired an exclusive license to practice hydraulic fracturing, a newly invented technique for releasing hitherto inaccessible oil and gas deposits from underground rock formations. Fracking, as the technique later came to be called, proved to be very profitable for HOWCO. Erle P. Halliburton died in October 1957, by which time his company had 20,000 employees. In 1959 HOWCO acquired Otis Engineering, another company active in oil-field equipment and services. The following year HOWCO shortened its name to Halliburton Co. to reflect the expanded scope of its operations. The company moved its headquarters from Oklahoma to Dallas in 1961. A major expansion and diversification came with acquisition of Brown & Root, Inc., a Texas-based engineering and construction company, in 1962. Engineering and construction came to be a very important part of Halliburton.