“Look, my hometown went through this with the frackers and that's a whole lot more involved then a single pipeline.........once the cap is done there's no more work..it's a done deal....they have ‘one’ guy running around the area reading meters. I'm telling you this isn't about thousands of jobs...its’ temporary workers who will more than likely sign on with the bidders.”
I disagree with your statement. I grew up in the east Texas oilfield and as a child I climbed on oil derricks. My father worked for Sun Oil Company from his twenties until he retired many years later. He was in charge of laying large oil pipes and the laying and care of the lines was what he did all those working years and there were crews of men needed for sustaining those pipe lines all those years. The job was unending.
In my adult life I owned Transco stock. They have oil lines going from the processing plants in the Houston ship channel area and down to Texas City where really huge pipelines ran from there up to the east coast. Those lines send heating oil and other oil products up to the east coast. I've seen on a chart the many lines there are going north. Those lines have to be maintained and it takes a large number of workers all along that line. Office workers are also required to generate records, reports, payroll, legal records/reports, etc..
Just because you don't physically see activity, it is happening. It will be the same for this new pipeline. The oil will go to the big plants in the Houston ship channel and Texas City to be refined into various products. Those plants are full of specialized workers and plenty of office people are also needed. Even if the oil products are shipped overseas, it takes our people to get the oil refined to be shipped.
If one needs a job and that pipeline is built, get a job laying the line or working in an office dealing with the laying and care of the line, or go to Texas and get a job in one of those many processing companies on our coast that will refine that oil.
It was oil pipelines that kept my father employed all his life and it was that oil money paid to my father that paid for my college. My mother sewed all my clothes until I graduated high school and was going to college. They took me to Dallas to Sanger Harris Department store and told me to buy any clothes I wanted to take to college. It was Sun Oil stock money that bought those clothes for me, the first store bought clothes I ever had.
Again...this is a pipe line 'for Canada'...
The Keystone XL Pipeline project is 'owned by TransCanada, a Canadian corporation' that builds, maintains, and owns oil and gas pipelines, power plants, and natural gas storage facilities IN NORTH AMERICA......BTW TransCanada 'already 'owns" the Keystone Pipeline. Further the only reason Canada went this way was because their own people 'voted down' the initial plans of putting it in their own country'.
"The project will create no more than 2,500-4,650 "temporary" direct construction jobs for two years,according to TransCanada’s own data supplied to the State Department,"................... estimate of the number of "permanent" jobs that could be created by work on the pipeline to be about 50 to 100.
All predictions for spinoff jobs, as you mentioned, rely on factors like the price of oil, energy innovation, politics, and the overall health of the economy. Furloughs happened to many when the oil price went down. and again....Trans Canada will employ their own people FIRST, who move from site to site throughout the states, then 'private contractors' and employment agencies to hire the "temporary workers"...good for about two years.
