First of all, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. I have gone through a lot of the previous materials and presentations that you've had here, so I'm hoping not to rehash some of the good information that I saw in some of the materials that you've seen already, but hopefully to add a little bit of value to that and maybe additional insights from the upstream producer's perspective.
I do want to highlight that although we focus on the upstream as the sector that we represent, it's not just large producers, it's also very small producers, down to some of our member companies that would be in the order of drilling two or three wells in a year. It's quite a diverse perspective on what the industry is, where it wants to go, and where it thinks it can go. It does provide a good integrated view.
I thought I would start with some really new information. I sent some information in some slides previously. I don't know if they translated that perfectly, but I thought I would start with a few opening remarks about some of the late-breaking news this week that would add some perspective on the current situation and highlight some of the direction that we think our sector could be and should be going into the future.
This first highlight of note that I wish to bring up is the recent media release late last week on the capital investment plans for our sector for the coming year 2016. We do this on a regular basis. It's not a forecast. It is a compilation of all our members, their capital programs and budgets, and how collectively that impacts activities.
In that context, over the last seven or eight years, every dollar of income that our member companies have made has been directly put back into the ground in activities in Canada. On top of that, we have had over the last several years, a pretty significant inflow of capital from foreign sources into Canada to support the activity levels up to date.
It is a pretty significant number. It's hard to put into context for average Canadians, but it is a sector that permeates a lot of our other industries, a lot of our alliances, associations, and supplier networks. It's a pretty far-reaching integrated network based on the capital investment that our sector brings into Canada and puts into Canada. Unfortunately, we had to announce this week that we've seen a 62% drop in capital investment in our sector from 2014 levels. To tell you what that number looks like, it is approximately $50 billion of investment that has been lost out of the Canadian economy since 2014, projected to 2016. That is a pretty significant drop.
Another way to translate that is in terms of actual well-drilling activity, which is a good indicator outside of the oil sands of the kinds of activities that drive local employment, local opportunities, and government revenues. We're projecting right now for 2016, a total number of 3,500 wells drilled primarily in western Canada. To give you a perspective, in 2014, that number was a little over 10,000. There has been a pretty significant impact, not just on sources of government revenues, sources of community employment, but also on the service sector that's related and relies on the investments that we bring in.
Although we've seen this week a slight recovery in the price of oil, it's important to note that we haven't seen the lasting effects of some of the decline that we have seen in terms of impacts on the service sector. Our industry relies heavily on that service sector. By service sector, I mean broadly. It's not just the companies that contract drilling for us but it's individual companies, one-truck type of operations hauling water for a facility.
It could be completion crews, but also if you go more broadly into the supply network, there are—for example in Prince Edward Island—three companies that supply goods and services to the oil sands, and they are impacted today by that decline and that impact. Once we lose the service sector and we start seeing drilling crews go south to the U.S., it becomes very difficult to bring them back. We are at the point now where I think our anxiety level for the sector has translated into a concern for the integrity of that value chain in the service sector and what we can do today to support that the best we can, so when there is a recovery we are able to get Canadians back to work.
The other thing I would point out is that this week we have our annual joint CAPP and Scotiabank investment symposium for our sector. It's held in Toronto every year. It's very well attended. Among the highlights you will see from that is, if I can quote the headline from one of the more notable things coming out of that symposium, that “The era of megaprojects in Canada’s oil sands is probably over ”. What that means—and we've seen this for a while—is that the value opportunity for us for our sector, and for our resources in Canada, is going to shift and we're going to be looking at more of the unconventional resource-play type of opportunities. The investors are looking for more confidence and shorter return periods. They don't want to wait 15 years to see what kind of return they're going to get from their investment. We've seen this phenomenon in the U.S. as well, in terms of the shift to investment into resource plays where you can shut and turn off a well program a lot quicker than a $2-billion oil sands project.
Now the converse of that is also true. We haven't seen a decline in oil production at the same time as the decline in oil price simply because it's also hard to turn off those megaprojects. You know the capital has been invested, and it's two-thirds or three-quarters of its way through, so that project will continue. We are still going to see growth in oil production in Canada for some time; however, new megaprojects are probably going to be a lot more challenged going forward than they have been in the past.
Another point I would highlight is that tomorrow the Alberta government announces its budget. I'm aware we're going into the lock-up in Edmonton tomorrow. We are expecting to see some manifestation of the recent climate policy statements and commitments made in Alberta. Certainly it's not the only province that has made significant commitments to the climate agenda, but we think Alberta should be particularly proud about the leadership position it has stated. We're hoping to see some evidence around the carbon levy piece that it has announced, the oil sands emissions limit, and the performance standards, as well as the methane reduction commitments that we have made as a province, and provinces, as well as federally.
Certainly in my last points before I turn it over to my colleagues, I think one thing I do want to mention, certainly, is the recent activity around the federal government leadership on market access and pipelines for our sector. We have seen some growing and certainly this week some more activity in that area, more intent stated in that area, which I would say from our sector's perspective we welcome dearly. It is really the underpinning piece for our aspirations on the climate policy; for indigenous peoples and their role in going forward, which is a key trigger in the market access issues from our perspective; for the regulatory confidence that we're hoping to see continue to emerge and grow in this country; and of course for the political commitment to get Canada's natural resources to the right markets, at the right time, all the time.
I'll stop there, and there are plenty of answers that I hopefully can provide to questions that come up from any of the detailed materials we've provided, as well as previous presentations.
Thank you.