Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). The first question is from Andrew Fairbanks of Bank of America.
Andrew Fairbanks - Bank of America
I just was curious, how you all are viewing the current asset acquisition opportunities in the market? And given your price, how those back up again your internal CNQ project at this point?
Steve Laut
Obviously, we are starting to see more and more properties brought on to the market. We are starting to see some reduction in the expectations of the sellers. And I'd say right now we are fairly close on the gas side, I think you probably buy not much but you can drill for at this point. On the oil side, we're maybe getting close but we're not there yet.
Andrew Fairbanks - Bank of America
In the areas you're interested in, will those still be getting around your existing operating areas?
Steve Laut
Yeah, pretty much. That's why we're looking at mostly within our core areas. I don't think we need to go inside our core areas for any kind of acquisition but we would not be adverse to doing that if we found a really good deal.
Operator
The next question is from Arjun Murti from Goldman Sachs.
Arjun Murti - Goldman Sachs
My question is related to the future phases of Horizon. I think you made some very interesting comments about productivity alone could get you 20% to 30% savings and obviously, steeling and other things are down. But you follow that up with the observation that I think is correct, that if the oil price comes back and industry activity heats up again, how can one gain confidence that industry overall, including CNQ doesn't get back to a less favorable position where the cost we escalate?
Is the only solution to that, M&A? We've seen one step here with Suncor, emerging with Petro-Canada. And do you see that as the key to getting to the situation where industry activity doesn't heat up too much or what other solutions do you have to gain confidence that you can keep the cost down, whenever you think it's time again to go forward with future phases?
Steve Laut
We do see a lot of gains on productivity there we can achieve. I don't think you need M&A activity to get the cost down. If you look at the players now, very well disciplined group and it's just a matter of organizing ourselves. So if we don't compete and directly head on head, these projects hang over at the same time, but segmented at the timing of them. You don't want to have everybody doing several work at the same time or electrical work all the same time. We need to stagger the projects, even though there are concurrent, they need to staggered. So we have less demand on each of the contractors and labor components.
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