Sure. We're not talking about wells. We're talking about drilling rig equipment.
For example, the overall drilling rig fleet peaked back in 2007 at around 900 drilling rigs. We have seen a gradual decrease in the overall equipment fleet, but that's really.... I would say that prior to the downturn we did see a decrease, but that was more in line with aligning the equipment with the market and where the market was going, which was with much heavier types of equipment and longer-reach horizontal types of wells, so the fleet did change.
What has changed rapidly in the last four years is not so much the changing specs or dynamics of the equipment; it's in fact this equipment, this high-tech innovative equipment. Some of the most technologically advanced drilling rigs in the entire world are built right here in Nisku.
Here in Nisku, if you take a 20-minute drive down to the heartland of our manufacturing sector here in the oil and gas industry, you'll see the construction of rigs, but those rigs are not being deployed in Canada anymore. They're being built here for export. Some of them are going to Alaska. Many of them, actually, are going into the United States.
What we've seen is that we've gone from 900 drilling rigs in 2007 to 600 today, so that's a delta of 300, and 200 of those in the last four years. We think we're going to be going down to about 550.
What we always compute is that every active rig that's working generates 135 direct and indirect jobs, and these are some of the highest-value jobs in the entire country. We have individuals who are coming in with a high school education and a good skill set to work with their hands and to work outside. There's a demographic that enjoys that kind of work. Even at the lowest end of a drilling rig crew, the opportunity for someone who has a grade 12 education to make $90,000 at a minimum, entry level, is not uncommon in our industry.
Those types of jobs are leaving. The talent is leaving and the equipment is leaving. I say this somewhat to raise awareness to our policy leaders that if we want to be in this space and we want to have the high-tech equipment that we need to compete, we have to make sure that we're sending the right signals and incentivizing that type of investment in this industry.