Less than a year after the Bush administration offered the nuclear industry several words of encouragement in its national energy policy plan, the industry won a second opportunity to smile when Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in January formally embraced Nevada's Yucca Mountain, about 80 miles from Las Vegas, as the underground repository for thousands of tons of high‑level nuclear waste from across the country.

As market forces increasingly enter electricity markets, demand trading has become more prevalent over the last few years in the United States. The differences between high wholesale market prices for electricity and prices paid by retail customers have created significant economic opportunities. The immediate beneficiaries include sellers of electricity with access to the wholesale market and large electricity customers with a desire-and the ability-to reduce demand.

The advent of deregulated wholesale electricity markets and the penetration of market forces into retail electricity markets have enormously enlarged the set of opportunities for lucrative financial gains. One of these opportunities is demand trading, which represents a key tool that can advance one of deregulation's principal goals-customer choice.

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.