Oil-services giant Halliburton Co. told employees to stay put. An oil trade group is concerned by the proposed border tax. 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 executive orders, including temporarily banning people from seven majority-Muslim countries and raising border tariffs, oil and natural gas companies — industries he vowed to help during his election campaign — stand to be hit the hardest. Last Monday, energy companies led declines in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. The American Petroleum Institute said Tuesday it was ‘concerned’ by Trump’s border tax adjustment.

“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 last 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.” Last Monday, 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.

A separate order that would impose a border tariff on Mexican goods may hurt refineries that use imported crude, according to Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group representing the oil and gas industry.

Of all the energy sectors that may feel the pain of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, oil and natural gas companies — industries he vowed to help during his election campaign — stand to be hit the hardest

“We’re continuing to do an analysis and we’ll be working with the leaders on the Hill once we figure out its broader implication,” Gerard said.

Meanwhile, Halliburton warned workers not to travel to the US if they are from any of the countries named in Trump’s order, including 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 email to employees.

The four worst performers in the S&P 500 at 4:36pm New York time last Monday were oil and gas companies. The S&P Oil & Gas Exploration and Production Select Industry Index was down 2.9pc last Monday. The index fell 0.3pc as of 3:58pm last Tuesday.

San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp. said in a statement last 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.

Last 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 LLC. Stein said he knows of one ‘international oil company’ that’s already reconsidering posting a new crude trader in Houston.

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 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 ExxonMobil 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 programs that train energy professionals — have a total of almost 700 students, faculty and scholars from the countries listed in Trump’s ban.

MIT said last Monday that two of its students are stranded abroad and barred from re-entering 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.”

About 35pc of the 441,000 people working in animal slaughtering and processing are immigrants, according to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute.

• Many refugees work in the meatpacking and dairy-farm industries across the US, said Eskinder Negash, senior vice president at the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants in Washington.

• During peak season, California’s farming industry collectively employs about 400,000 and relies ‘fairly heavily’ on foreign-born workers, according to Bryan Little at the California Farm Bureau Federation.

—Bloomberg contibutors: Joe Carroll, Bailey Lipschultz, Alex Nussbaum, Tim Loh, Mark Chediak, Robert Tuttle, Susanne Barton, Joe Deaux, Danielle Bochove, Megan Durisin, Jeff Wilson, Mario Parker and Marvin G. Perez.

— Bloomberg/The Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, February 6th, 2017