How has the gas utility industry changed during your tenure as head of Northwest Natural?

The trends are clear. When I arrived six years ago, we as a company benchmarked 34 gas distribution utilities as comparable companies in most respects to Northwest Natural Gas. Today, we're benchmarking only 14. The convergence issues of gas and electric are important. That's a real issue of how to manage the clear trend toward combination companies.

Will Atmos remain a gas‑only utility company?

You never say never. Our strategy to date has been to stick with natural gas. We serve a lot of small and medium‑size communities in our eleven states. We haven't taken on more than we can deal with. We started in 1983 with 300,000 customers in West Texas and when we complete the Mississippi Valley acquisition, we'll be 1.7 million customers.

Natural gas industry officials hope they'll be able to look back at 2001 and view the year's series of sideshows as only minor setbacks to their goal of raising the industry's stature and further improving the efficiency of the gas business. Although the industry continues to feel aftershocks from California's electric market restructuring failure and Enron's collapse, many signs point to a relatively painless rebound for a business that has grown increasingly competitive since the mid‑1980s.

Beware of the eternal doomsayer who persists in warning we're going to run out of oil or gas sometime in our children or grandchildren's lifetimes. That's the advice from members of the exploration and production community who've seen firsthand the power of technology in finding and producing reserves.