Canadian Natural believes that balance between natural gas, heavy crude oil, light crude oil and synthetic crude oil provides some diversification from commodity price risk while also facilitating more options with which to allocate capital to the highest return projects. Balance between short, medium and long-term projects also provides more visibility to future growth initiatives.

Maintaining a strong Balance Sheet and access to capital markets is integral to delivering our plan. The Company targets strong investment grade debt ratings and manages our liquidity as a core asset.

The Company strives to operate and own 100% of our assets. This allows us to be nimble and control the pace of development, facilitating an ever-vigilant weekly allocation of capital by the Management Committee. Simultaneously, when practical we avoid committing ourselves to long-term drilling or supply contracts.

This is an important element to the Company’s strategy. Canadian Natural strives to be an effective and efficient producer in every product and basin in which we operate. Over the long-term, the Company believes that only the effective and efficient producers will continue to generate economic returns throughout all commodity price cycles.

Canadian Natural views this as a low risk approach to value creation as emphasis is placed on maximizing the value of already discovered resource versus trying to find the next major pool. We use proven new technologies, our own discoveries, and new industry findings to effectively “lead the followers”. This ever-increasing industry knowledge is maximized across our large developed and undeveloped land holdings, creating upside potential.

The combination of our low cost profile and extensive development-based focus makes Canadian Natural a natural consolidator of properties throughout our core regions. Often counter-cyclical, our major acquisitions have made us a stronger and more diverse company. Most of these major acquisitions were comprised of a strong footing in our core regions and on occasion provided entry into a new strategic basin.