Halliburton Shares Take a Hit After Report

Halliburton shares fell about 15.5 percent shortly after the release of the report, before regaining some ground; near the end of trading, the shares were down 9.8 percent from their Wednesday closing price.

In contrast, American shares of BP, the British oil giant, rose 0.92 percent, even though the report also criticized BP over the deficient cement.

Shares in Halliburton, the oilfield services company, fell sharply on Thursday afternoon, minutes after the release of a report by a presidential commission saying that the company knew the cement it intended to use to seal the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was unstable.

The result of at least one of those tests were given to BP on March 8, according to investigators. Another test, about a week before the blowout on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, and Halliburton never sent those findings to BP.

“It is a fight-or-flight moment when you see these headlines,” Blake Hutchinson, an oilfield service analyst with Howard Weil, said of the stock market.

Mr. Hutchinson said that he had not changed his fundamental outlook for Halliburton. “I am not seeing information that is necessarily new to how I would think about Halliburton’s participation in this well,” he said.

Said Mr. Gerry: “This is going to be a long, and drawn-out, and very messy process. A lot of finger pointing is going to come out of that.”

Some analysts took the report in stride and called the reaction in the market knee-jerk.

“Not a whole lot has changed in our eyes,” said Collin Gerry of Raymond James & Associates. “You just have some very directed language coming out of the commission that mentions Halliburton a few times, so they are feeling the pain today.”

The report found that the cement that Halliburton recommended to seal the Macondo well was unstable in tests, and that the instability might have contributed to the blowout that killed 11 rig workers and left the well gushing out of control. The commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests showing that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.