Halliburton’s not alone in move to region

Halliburton Chairman and CEO Dave Lesar will likely see some familiar faces when he opens a new corporate headquarters for the oil-field-services giant in Dubai.

A number of other Houston oil-field-services firms, including Baker Hughes and Schlumberger, have recently opened or expanded offices in the United Arab Emirates. And their goals are all the same: to be near oil-rich nations in the Middle East and to increase their business in the quickly growing Eastern Hemisphere.
But U.S. energy firms and companies that support them say the growing influence of the region does not have to come at the expense of Houston. Rather, it’s a matter of going where the business is, which appears to be with state-owned oil companies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

“We have to do this to grow,” said Marty Spake, spokesman for CB&I, an engineering and construction firm in The Woodlands that announced in February it would open a 200-person office in the United Arab Emirates.

The office will handle engineering work for the large-scale oil and gas projects the company is landing everywhere from Australia to Thailand, and was needed to lure skilled engineers who are in short supply in the United States, Spake said.

Houston Chronicle