The Fact Checker has a long history of looking into puffed-up job estimates for the Keystone XL pipeline, an international energy project that stalled through the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump and now appears frozen. On his first day in office, President Biden revoked a key federal permit Trump had issued. At Buttigieg’s confirmation hearing the next day, Cruz said that “in 2021, the Keystone pipeline was scheduled to have more than 11,000 jobs.”

The Facts

As part of an executive order on climate change, Biden revoked a March 2019 permit that Trump had granted to TC Energy, the Canadian energy company behind the Keystone pipeline. “Leaving the Keystone XL pipeline permit in place would not be consistent with my Administration’s economic and climate imperatives,” Biden’s order says. On the campaign trail, the Democrat said investments in renewable energy and infrastructure could generate 10 million jobs.

But in a news release, TC Energy said Biden’s action “would directly lead to the layoff of thousands of union workers.” (In follow-up news reports, the company said “more than 1,000.” A manager on the pipeline project said “hundreds” of workers had been laid off since Biden’s executive action.)

The most comprehensive estimate of Keystone jobs was calculated by the State Department in a 2014 report.

Over two construction seasons, the main beneficiaries of the project would be Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska — each would need to hire between 2,700 and 4,000 construction workers — though Kansas would also hire about 200.

  • Montana: 4,000 construction workers for an average of 19 weeks = 1,462 workers
  • South Dakota: 3,500 construction workers for an average of 20 weeks = 1,346 workers
  • Nebraska: 2,700 construction workers for an average of 19½ weeks = 1,013 workers
  • Kansas: 200 construction workers for an average of 33½ weeks = 129 workers

Because of the difficulty in determining whether the project would last one or two years, the State Department decided to express all of the jobs as an annual figure. So those 4,000 construction workers in Montana who work for 19 weeks were turned into nearly 1,500 jobs on an annual basis.