Reuters reports Halliburton has been cutting staff again recently. It was not known whether the company’s operations in Duncan were affected.
The news service cited two sources familiar with the matter, indicating Halliburton has joined other companies in making employment cuts because of increasing costs and lower crude oil prices.
Halliburton, a company that got its start in southern Oklahoma before moving its headquarters to Houston, Texas, reportedly carried out some of the workforce reductions over the past several weeks.
Sources cited by Reuters revealed that three business divisions lost between 20% and 40% of their employees in the time period.
The company had 48,395 employees at the end of 2024.
OilPrice.com quoted Halliburton CEO Jeff Miller as indicating the shift in market conditions has been significant.
“To put it plainly, what I see tells me the oilfield services market will be softer than I previously expected over the short to medium term,” he said during a recent quarterly conference call.
The reported layoffs are not a new experience at the oil and gas company. Halliburton laid off 240 employees from its Duncan service center in 2020, a year after it shut down a new El Reno operation. The layoffs followed an earlier workforce reduction of 350 employees in Oklahoma operations. The Duncan center reportedly had an estimated 2,600 employees in 2013.
Halliburton did not respond nor comment to the claims.
However, the company, described as the third-largest global oilfield services firm, has, like other oil and gas operations, experienced an uncertainty in global trade policies, largely due to lower crude oil prices.
Crude prices have fallen more than 10% in 2025 and could be affected even more as OPEC+ agreed last week to a change in crude oil production.
Halliburton’s reported layoffs followed recent reports that ConocoPhillips was implementing a 25% reduction in staff in the name of reducing costs. ConocoPhillips has nearly 13,000 employees and an estimated 10% of them are located at its former headquarters in Bartlesville.
However, according to the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, there was no word how the layoffs are affecting Oklahoma operations.