Halliburton announced on April 5, 2007, that it had sold the division and severed its corporate relationship with KBR, which had been its contracting, engineering and construction unit as a part of the company.

[14][15] The company has also been criticized for refusing to comply with United States Environmental Protection Agency requests for transparency around chemicals it uses in hydraulic fracturing.

These businesses continue to be profitable, and the company is one of the world's largest players in these service industries; it is second after Schlumberger, and is followed by Saipem, Weatherford International, and Baker Hughes.

KBR is a major international construction company that works in an industry that tends to have an element of volatility and is subject to significant fluctuations in revenue and profit.

As a result of the asbestos-related costs and staggering losses on the Barracuda Caratinga FPSO construction project based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Halliburton lost approximately $900 million U.S. a year from 2002 through 2004.

A final non-appealable settlement in the asbestos case was reached in January 2005 which allowed Halliburton subsidiary KBR to exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy and returned the company to quarterly profitability.

[19] At a meeting for investors and analysts in August 2004, a plan was outlined to divest the KBR division through a possible sale, spin-off or initial public offering.

The stock of the corporation was owned by Erle and Vida Halliburton and by seven major oil companies: Magnolia, Texas, Gulf, Humble, Sun, Pure and Atlantic.

Equipment was provided for the first multiwell platform offshore China, and an Otis Engineering team controlled a gigantic Tengiz field blowout in the Soviet Union.

[22] Following the end of Operation Desert Storm in February 1991, the Pentagon, led by then defense secretary Dick Cheney, paid Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root Services over $8.5 million to study the use of private military forces with American soldiers in combat zones.

[29] During the Balkans conflict in the 1990s, Kellogg Brown-Root (KBR) supported U.S. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Hungary with food, laundry, transportation, and other life-cycle management services.

Such behavior, undertaken while senior Republican (later U.S. vice president) Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, may have violated the Trading with the Enemy Act.

[34] In November 2002, KBR was tasked to plan oil well firefighting in Iraq, and in February 2003 was issued a contract to conduct the work.

In May 2003, Halliburton revealed in SEC filings that its KBR subsidiary had paid a Nigerian official $2.4 million in bribes in order to receive favorable tax treatment.,[37][38] United Arab Emirates In October 2004, after emerging from the bankruptcy protection,[39] Halliburton opened a new 250,000-square-foot (23,000 m2) facility on 35 acres (140,000 m2), replacing an older facility that opened in 1948, in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

[40] On January 24, 2006, Halliburton's subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) announced that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build "temporary detention and processing facilities" or internment camps.

According to a press release posted on the Halliburton website, "The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.

The container was a ramshackle in complete disorder indicating that thieves were after "valuables and not only laptops," said an expert consulted by the daily newspaper Folha de S.

[42] In 2008, Halliburton agreed to outsource its mission-critical information technology infrastructure to a Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex data center operated by CyrusOne Networks LLC.

[43] On May 14, 2010, President Barack Obama said in an interview with CNN that "you had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else" when referring to the congressional hearings held during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The firm announced it would acquire Baker Hughes for around $35 billion in cash and stock, creating an oilfield services company that aims to compete with Schlumberger.

[51] Halliburton has become the object of several controversies involving the Iraq War and the company's ties to former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

[55] Bunnatine Greenhouse, a civil servant with 20 years of contracting experience, had complained to Army officials on numerous occasions that Halliburton had been unlawfully receiving special treatment for work in Iraq, Kuwait and the Balkans.

"[57] An internal report released in 2010 by BP into the Deepwater Horizon explosion claimed that poor practices of Halliburton staff had contributed to the disaster.

[60][61] The case relates to an alleged $182 million contract involving a four-company joint venture to build a liquefied natural gas plant on Bonny Island in southern Nigeria.

[63][64] In mid-December 2010, the case was settled when Nigeria agreed to drop the corruption charges against Cheney and Halliburton in exchange for a $250 million settlement.

[66] In 2002, Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) reports were completed to measure the amount of chemicals emitted from Halliburton's Harris County, Texas facility.

The TRI is a publicly available EPA database that contains information on toxic chemical releases and waste management activities reported annually by certain industries as well as federal facilities.

[citation needed] Jamie Leigh Jones testified at a Congressional hearing that she had been gang-raped by as many as seven co-workers in Iraq in 2005 when she was an employee of KBR, and then falsely imprisoned in a shipping container for 24 hours without food or drink.

In June 2007, several days after Stewart Bowen, the Special Inspector General, released a new report, the Army announced that KBR would share another $150 billion contract with two other contractors, Fluor and Dyncorp, over the next 10 years.

[77] However, in a statement by senior military officials in Iraq, an investigation revealed that troops did not abandon the civilians and they were all exiting the "kill zone" during the ambush.