The pipeline itself is done by four principal crafts: the pipefitters, who do the welding and fitting the pipe up, and work on the pumping stations and the facilities; the operating engineers, the guys on the sidebooms, the cranes, and the backhoes who operate the heavy equipment; the teamsters who operate the big trucks that string the pipe; and the labourers who do the skid hustling and who are really the maids-of-all-work, doing everything from the guy they call the “band-aid”, who's the first aid man, through to the straw boss, through to the whatever. There's another group of people who come in and X-ray, or it's now called integrated phased array...whatever. It's become much more complicated than it was in my day.
To do a fair sized pipeline of 300 kilometres, there will probably be two or three spreads for two seasons, probably employing upwards of 6,000 people. If it is an oil pipeline, it means we will have thousands of people in a variety of trades, including plumbers, boilermakers, millwrights, iron workers, sheet metalworkers, insulators, labourers, scaffolders, carpenters, and the occasional elevator constructor. I should have a list of all my affiliates are, shouldn't I? About 60 trades are involved.
The pipeline that has 1 million barrels through it, like Energy East, needs an infrastructure that costs, let's call it, $10 billion to build. Roughly translated, $10 billion in infrastructure takes 65 million work hours to construct. If we assume for the moment that it took 6,000 people to build it, which is not a bad estimate, those 65 million hours will result in a hundred full-time jobs. Of those hundred full-time jobs, 40% will be trades jobs to keep the place running.
Twice a year or perhaps once a year, depending on the place, roughly 3,500 people will descend on that facility for 42 days, basically rebuild it, and then disappear.
For us, these jobs are not petty. These are big-time, shoot-a-dime, work opportunities. They are the opportunities in which we get to train the next group of tradespeople. Where Canada sits right now, the construction workforce is basically a baby boom workforce. No one thought the baby boomers were ever going to retire. We're going to fool them. We're all going somewhere around June 16, 2016. We're looking at replacing, call it 350,000 people, and 40% of all of our managers and supervisors in the next seven years. We need ongoing work in order to train the next group that's coming.
I'm getting preachy now because this is near and dear to my heart. When you look at it, the jobs that are on the pipeline are only a pale reflection of the jobs that are created on both ends of that line.