"We're turning jobs down that we have equipment for because we can't hire qualified people," Duane Mather, president of Nabors Canada, one of the country's largest drilling companies, told the Globe and Mail.

Mather said the company has had to refuse six jobs in the last 10 days because it can't staff its rigs.

In 2009 Canada drilled a total of 8,450 wells. That compares with the 2006 peak of 22,127 wells drilled.

Nabors had to slash its workforce to 1,200 from about 3,500 as a result of the recession.

"We've called back everybody that we laid off, and the door is wide open. The advertising is going on in every place we ever hired people during those boom times," Mather said.

But Nabors cannot promise work beyond the winter drilling season, which continues for only the next six to eight weeks. Typically, the first quarter is the busiest quarter for drilling. Most drillers expect 200 to 250 days of work annually in order to leave jobs they may have found after the oil price crash.

The Petroleum Services Association of Canada, in the first update to its 2010 drilling activity forecast released this week, expects a total of 9,000 new wells will be drilled across Canada this year. That's an increase of 12 percent -- or 1,000 wells -- from its original forecast. All of the new wells added to the list are to be drilled in Alberta.

"Hopefully this means we're coming out of the doldrums we've been in for the better part of 18 months," said PSAC President Roger Soucy, reports Calgary's CHQR-AM radio.

While Soucy says he's optimistic about the future, the industry still has a long way to go and "it will be quite some time before we see levels of activity seen between 2005-7, if ever again," he said.

BMO Capital Markets analyst Michael Mazar is even more optimistic, with his forecast of 10,675 wells for this year. He believes 2010 is the year the industry will start to "turn the corner" on a recovery.

Three years ago, it took an average of 6.5 to seven days to drill a well. Now deeper and more sophisticated wells have raised the average to 11, which means fewer wells are producing more drilling days, and more revenue, for service companies.

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