Pipelines Creating Jobs and Opportunities

Keystone XL has recently been the subject of a vigorous debate about the number of jobs the project will generate during its construction. There have been many guesses, studies and estimates thrown around over the last five years and these have often muddied the debate about the economic impacts of a project such as Keystone XL. At TransCanada we are able to build plans – and can show, right down to a single job, how many workers it will take to build a project — because we’ve been building pipelines for more than 60 years.

We have always maintained that Keystone XL will directly employ 9,000 American workers. The southern portion of KXL — the Gulf Coast Pipeline — is nearing completion and has already directly employed about 4,000 American workers. And combined, these two projects have directly supported about 7,000 American manufacturing jobs from laborers, in the Siemens factory in Ohio, who build the pumps for pipeline pump stations, to steel workers, in Arkansas, who manufactured the steel used in the Gulf Coast and Keystone XL pipelines. That’s 20,000 jobs that can be directly linked to this pipeline, a new, modern and critical piece of America’s energy infrastructure.

TransCanada has negotiated binding Project Labor Agreements with a number of leading North American unions. These agreements are contracts — binding agreements — that outline the number of workers we need and the number of workers, training and skill development programs that these unions will provide. These same unions helped provide some of the workers who built the original Keystone Pipeline.

Ready more on the TransCanada blog.