Halliburton Co. just offered some of the best evidence yet that fracking, which turned the US into the biggest oil and gas producer, is spreading around the world.
The Houston-based company, which fracks more wells than anyone, said on Wednesday that it has shifted some idled equipment overseas as growth slows in the shale basins of Texas and other states.
“There’s incentives to move equipment outside the US, which we’re doing in some cases,” Chief Executive Officer Jeff Miller said during a call with analysts discussing the company’s fourth-quarter results.
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The US shale boom that drove sales for oil services providers like Halliburton for more than a decade is sputtering in the face of falling crude prices and an imminent global glut. Tepid spending by customers is prompting the company to put equipment into storage, or stacking in industry parlance.
“If these companies aren’t investing in it, we are moving equipment away,” Miller said. “Prudent stacking of equipment preserves it for the recovery in North America and becomes an avenue to feed our growing international unconventionals business.”
Fracking in North America Starts to Plateau
Horizontal wells by date of first production
The number of rigs operating in the US is down by about a third since the end of 2022. There has been an almost 40% decline in active fracking crews has dropped almost 40% in that same period, according to industry data provider Primary Vision.
US drillers are running out of prime spots to tap, something that could provide a boost for service companies, Miller said. Producers will need to lean more heavily on advanced technology, such as pumps that supercharge oil flows, just to keep output steady as crude gets harder to extract.
There’s also an appetite for such high-tech apparatus overseas. Miller sees Latin America driving growth this year, in places like in Brazil’s deep-sea oil pockets, Argentina’s Vaca Muerta formation and fast-growing producer Guyana.
Those three countries alone are set to account for half of expected global crude production growth in 2026, adding 400,000 barrels a day, according to the latest estimates from the US Energy Information Administration.
And then there’s Venezuela. Since the capture of President Nicolas Maduro earlier this month by US forces, President Donald Trump has touted the opening up of the country’s oil sector to American investment.
Miller says Halliburton is eyeing a return to the country, which could provide a further boost to overseas operations.
—Emma Sanchez, Bloomberg News
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