Oil braces for Trump ban fallout as Halliburton says stay put

Oil-services giant Halliburton Co told employees to stay put. Another global oil company is reconsidering whether to place a crude trader in Houston. And universities that train energy workers across the country estimated that hundreds of students may be affected.
Of all the energy sectors that may feel the pain of President Donald Trump’s order to temporarily ban people from seven majority-Muslim countries, oil and natural gas companies – industries he vowed to help during his election campaign – stand to be hit the hardest. On Monday, energy companies led declines in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index as investors weighed Trump’s first week in office.
“Oil and gas is going to have the most heartburn from this,” Michael Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at University of Texas at Austin, said by phone on Monday. “Other parts of the energy sector, like the electricity sector, are more domestically situated with its workforce and its assets.”
Just last week, Trump said during a speech that he’d work to “unleash the full power of American energy.” On Monday, those energy companies – from oil and gas explorers to electric utilities – withheld comment while working to assess the impact of his immigration order on their businesses.
Halliburton warned workers not to travel to the US if they are from any of the countries named in Trump’s immigration ban signed last week. The order targets those from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya.
“The company is notifying employees of these nationalities that travel to the US is inadvisable during the travel restriction period,” Lawrence Pope, Halliburton’s executive vice president of administration and chief human resources officer, said in an e-mail to employees.
San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp said in a statement on Monday that it’s still reviewing the White House’s executive order, adding that it “values the contributions” of all employees, regardless of their countries of origin or religion.
Monday was “a reversal of the initial trade that was based on the idea that Trump would be a traditional Republican, and that his anti-immigration and trade restructuring promises were just to get elected,” Bill O’Grady, chief market strategist at Confluence Investment Management in St Louis, which oversees $6.1bn, said by telephone.
Energy companies may think twice about basing jobs in the US, said George Stein, managing director of New York-based recruiting firm Commodity Talent. Stein said he knows of one “international oil company” that’s already reconsidering posting a new crude trader in Houston.
The firm may instead place the job in Latin America, said Stein, who declined to name the company but said it was one of his clients. Some companies “will be able to meet their hiring needs if a non-US citizen is the best choice by installing them in London or Singapore or Sao Paulo or Calgary,” he said.
Another unintended consequence: The countries targeted by Trump’s ban may end up retaliating by refusing to work with US oil and gas companies, according to University of Texas at Austin’s Webber. Supervisors in Houston could be prevented from visiting employees and clients in nations affected by the executive order, he said.
Iraq’s parliament has already urged its government to bar US citizens from entering the country in response to Trump’s entry ban. Halliburton and Exxon Mobil Corp are among US energy companies that do business there.
Trump’s ban could have long-lasting consequences for the next generation of US energy leaders, Webber said. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Houston and Texas Tech University – all of which run programmes that train energy professionals – have a total of almost 700 students, faculty and scholars from the countries listed in Trump’s ban.
MIT said on Monday that two of its students are stranded abroad and barred from reentering the US. University of Texas at Austin and University of Houston were among those that advised affected students to refrain from international travel.
“If the best students in the world aren’t joining the American workforce,” Webber said, “‘then they will go somewhere else.”