Good morning, and welcome to the Northwest Natural Gas Company's Fourth Quarter Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. (Operator Instructions) Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Bob Hess. Please go ahead, Mr. Hess.

Thank you, Dana. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2014 earnings call. As a reminder some of the things that will be said this morning contain forward-looking statements. They are based on management's assumptions, which may or may not come true, and you should refer to the language at the end of our press release for the appropriate cautionary statements and also to our SEC filings for additional information. We do expect to file our 10-K later today. As mentioned, this teleconference is being recorded and will be available on our website following the call. Please note that these calls are designed for the financial community. If you are an individual investor and have questions, please contact me directly at area code 503-220-2388. Media please can contact, Melissa Moore at area code 503-220-2436. Speaking this morning are Gregg Kantor, President and Chief Executive Officer and Steve Feltz, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Gregg and Steve have some opening remarks, and then will be available to answer your questions. Also joining us today are other members of our executive team, who will help answer any questions you may have. With that, let me turn it over to Gregg for his opening remarks.

Thanks Bob. Good morning, everyone and welcome to fourth quarter and year-end review. I'll begin today with an overview of 2014 and then turn it over to Steve to provide the financial details for the quarter and the year. I’ll wrap up the call with a look-forward. For Northwest Natural 2014 was a year of both opportunity and challenge. Last year our utility performance was solid, with improvements in customer growth and margin. However, those results were offset by losses associated with our gas cost sharing mechanism and the impact of natural gas prices. We also continued to see weakness in the California storage market hampering the financial returns from our Gill Ranch storage facility. In the midst to be varying factors, we delivered earnings of $2.16 per share and 2014 while providing a total shareholder return of approximately 22%. On the growth front, the Northwest economy made positive gains last year with Oregon’s employment rebounding to prerecession levels and unemployment rates continuing to fall. In 2014, we saw a healthy increase in commercial margins and an uptick in commercial new construction activity. The housing sector also improved with Portland home sales up nearly 4% and the average sale price up 7% last year compared to 2013. In addition, United Van Lines ranged Oregon its top moving destination last year, a positive indicator for future housing sector growth. And in Clark County in Washington, the fastest growing county in our service territory, home sales increased 8% with the average sale price increasing about 10%. These improvements help drive up our customer growth rate to 1.4% last year, and in the process we reached a new milestone adding our 700,000 customer. We believe last year’s healthy market improvements coupled with our substantial price advantage over electricity and oil put us in…

Thank you, Gregg and good morning everyone. In 2014 we made significant progress on a number of fronts, including operational improvements and some important long term growth initiatives in both the utility and gas storage businesses. Additionally as you've heard earlier we received an order from the OPUC on how we would recover future environmental costs, which was a significant financial issue carried over from our last rate case in 2012. I’ll talk more about the financial implications of that order later on. But first let me turn your attention to 2014 results. Earnings for the fourth quarter were $1.04 per share on net income of $28.5 million. That was down slightly from $1.07 per share on $29 million a year ago. Results for the quarter reflect an increase in utility earnings largely due to higher margin and lower operating and maintenance expense. The utility increase was more than offset by a decrease from our gas storage segment which was driven by the re-contracting of Gill Ranch capacity at lower prices due to the depressed market conditions in California. The utility realized margin gains despite significantly warmer weather and lower customer usage. During the quarter, temperatures were 25% warmer than average and delivered volumes were down 13% compared to a year ago. The steady margin gains from our utility reflect our consistent customer growth and the effectiveness of our weather normalization and decoupling mechanisms. Now turning to full year results, consolidated earnings were $2.16 per share on net income of $58.7 million in 2014, as compared to $2.24 per share on $60.5 million a year ago. From the utility, net income for 2014 was $58.6 million, up from $54.9 million a year ago. A $12 million increase in margin was driven by customer growth, incremental use by commercial customers on…

Thanks Steve. In 2014 our utility performance was solid with improvements in customer growth and added rate based returns on gas reserves and other system investments. We also made progress on our other growth initiatives. Earlier this month we received approval from Portland General Electric to move forward with the permitting demand acquisition work required for a potential expansion project at Mist, our underground gas storage facility. The project would be designed to provide no notice storage services to PGE’s natural gas bio-generating plants at Port Westward in Oregon. The potential expansion would include a new reservoir providing up to 2.5 billion cubic feet of available storage, an additional compressor station with design capacity of 120,000 dekatherms of gas per day and a 13 mile pipeline to connect the PGE’s gas plants at Port Westward. In 2015 our team will be working to obtain all the required permits and certain property rights and assuming successful completion of those necessary elements the current estimated cost of the expansion is approximately $125,000 million with a potential in service date in the 2018, 2019 winter season, depending on I should say the permitting process in construction schedule. As you may recall Oregon passed a bill effective last year that allows the OPUC to incent natural gas utilities to undertake projects that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We view this legislation as an exciting opportunity to make a positive environmental impact while potentially serving our customers and communities in new ways. In 2014 we worked through a rulemaking effort with the OPUC staff and customer advocates rules for what we are referring to as the carbon solutions program were then passed by the Oregon Commission this past December. In parallel to that rulemaking effort last year we began assessing a number of possible projects spanning several areas. Examples of potential projects involve reducing methane emissions during pipeline maintenance and repair, residential oil conversion program and distributed generation projects that use natural gas to increase energy efficiency. At this point, we are refining concepts and meeting with interested stakeholders to discuss our ideas, including the OPUC staff, customer advocates and energy efficiency groups. Our goal this year is to file several projects with the Oregon Commission to consider and hopefully to approve. In my view the carbon solutions program offers an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate our spirit of innovation to showcase the important role natural gas can play in helping our region meet its environmental goals and add to the Company’s bottom line. In the months ahead we intend to make progress in a number of areas as I’ve said, continuing to grow our utility customer base, completing the last two remaining dockets from our 2012 rate case proceedings, advancing the north Mist expansion project, and doing all of this while continuing to provide safe and reliable service to our customers. Thanks again for joining us this morning and now I’d be happy to open it up for questions.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session (Operator Instructions).

It's hard to believe we were that clear on all of this stuff, but it doesn’t appear there are any questions. We'll wait another few seconds here.

Our first question is from Derek Walker of Bank of America. Mr. Walker?

Just I appreciate the color going through the order on the environmental piece here. Just a quick follow-up and there was a lot of nuances to it about conditions associated with it, but I think in general in the past or at least at times you’ve been able to achieve little bit above sort of allowed ROE, but does this new mechanism effectively to limit your ability to go slightly above that, the 9.5%?

It does in those instances where we spend more than what is in the in the tariff writer and the insurance. So we’re spending more than that amount, which is $10 million, it will limit going above our allowed return on equity.

And as far as the -- just given on the commodity backdrop, as far as additional wells being drilled is there -- I guess what you're seeing on that development side?

Well, as I said in the remarks we do have the ability to drill on a well-by-well basis. But the way that works though is that Jonah Energy Inc. proposes wells to us and then we get to evaluate and make a decision about on a well-by-well basis whether we’re going to proceed with those wells. Right now there haven’t been any proposed to us, not exactly certain if there will be this year and again we take them on a well-by-well basis. I don’t expect that there will be -- even if they do propose wells that they will be large. Again last year there were 10 that were proposed to us. So I don’t think that’s going to be a very large amount if there are wells proposed. The other part of it is that we continue to look at a second overall gas reserve deal as part of a discussion we’re having with the commission on what’s the right amount of gas reserves to have. We call that our hedging docket which was -- is going to be open this year and hopefully completed this year and that will tell us whether we’ve got the right amount of gas reserves in our portfolio or not and hopefully we'll get through that this year and it will give us some direction on a future deal. Maybe just a little bit more follow-up on the first part of your question Derek, which was about over earning, it does in most cases where we’re as I said spending more than $10 million, prevent us from over earning in those years. But I would also say that the important part of this docket I kind of want to underscore was the costs of this are large for the company in the future and our goal here was to make sure we got full recovery and the order does do that and we really believe that this is a very reasonable path forward for us.

(Operator Instructions).

Well, if there are no other questions, thank you all for joining us this morning. We really appreciate your interest in our Company and look forward to seeing you down the road. Thanks.