Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Black Hills Corp. 2014 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Adrian, and I will be your coordinator for today. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the presentation over to Mr. Jerome Nichols, Director Investor Relations of Black Hills Corporation. Please proceed.

Thank you, Adrian. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Black Hills Corp.'s Third Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. Leading our quarterly earnings discussion today are David Emery, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Tony Cleberg, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin today, I would like to note that Black Hills will be attending the EEI Financial Conference next week in Dallas, Texas. You can find our presentation materials and webcast information on our website at www.blackhillscorp.com under the Investor Relations heading. During our earnings discussion today, some of the comments we make may contain forward-looking statements as defined by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and there are a number of uncertainties inherent in such comments. Although we believe that our expectations and beliefs are based on reasonable assumptions, actual results may differ materially. We direct you to our earnings release, Slide 2 of the investor presentation on our website and our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a list of some of the factors that could cause future results to differ materially from our expectations. I will now turn the call over to David Emery.

Thank you, Jerome, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 3 of the webcast deck for those of you who are following along. Our format will be similar to previous quarters. I'll give a quick overview of the quarter, Tony Cleberg will talk about financials and give an update there, and then I'll give an overview of forward strategy. Moving on to Slide 4. This incidentally, that's a picture of our new Cheyenne Prairie Generating Station, if you're interested. Slide 5 is third quarter highlights. We had a very busy and productive quarter. From a business environment standpoint, we had cooler weather in our utility service territories that benefited our natural gas utilities, especially in September, but tempered results a little bit earlier in the quarter with our electric utilities. Highlights for our utility subsidiaries. Recently, we announced an agreement to acquire a small natural gas utility, a little under 7,000 customers in northwest Wyoming, and we still have to file for regulatory approvals and don't expect that to close until probably around mid-year next year. Black Hills Power filed for approval in both South Dakota and Wyoming to construct a new 144-mile, $54 million transmission line that will originate northeast Wyoming and end in Rapid City, South Dakota. On that process, we expect to evolve over the next couple of quarters. Our Cheyenne Prairie Generating Station, our new $222 million, 132 megawatt gas-fired -- natural gas-fired power plant was placed in the commercial service on October 1, on time and on budget. The new rates for Wyoming customers of both Black Hills Power and Cheyenne Light were in effect October 1. We've implemented interim rates in South Dakota effective October 1, and we have a rate hearing in South Dakota in January. Black Hills Power and Cheyenne Light,…

Thank you, Dave. Good morning. For everyone on the call, thank you for taking the time to listen today. Many of you are very knowledgeable about our company, about who we are, where we've been and where we're going. Our third quarter performance continue to bridge our past to the future by delivering both on business execution and financial results. As far as the third quarter of financial results, we improved our adjusted earnings per share by 28% year-over-year, with 2 large contributors coming from lower interest expense and an improved tax rate. As you will recall, the weather helped us outperform in the first quarter of this year, but in the second and third quarter, we experienced very mild weather that dampened our operating income. If you compare our adjusted earnings per share for the first 9 months of 2014 to the same period in 2013, we improved by 22%. Moving to Slide 12. We report GAAP earnings and reconciled earnings as adjusted of non-GAAP measure. We isolate special items to communicate earnings that we believe better indicate our ongoing performance. This slide displays the last 5 quarters, and in 2014, we've had no special items. So our third quarter GAAP earnings per share of $0.60 compares to our 2013 adjusted earnings per share of $0.47. The 2013 adjusted earnings per share excluded a mark-to-market gain of $0.05 on interest rate swaps that we settled near the end of last year. Slide 13 displays our third quarter revenue and operating income. Later, I'll describe the year-over-year changes by segment. But here the main point is, we are predominantly regulated, generating 82% of our operating income from our utilities in the third quarter. Our operating income declined by about 2% or $1.2 million compared to the same period in 2013.…

Thank you, Tony. Moving on to Slide 23, forward strategy. We group by strategic goals into 4 major categories with the overall objective of being an industry leader in all we do. On Slide 24, related to growth. Our strong capital spending drives our earnings growth, and we project strong capital investments far in excess of depreciation for the next several years. Slide 25 provides a detail related to historical and forecasted capital spending by business segment. Slide 26 is a subset of the information on Slide 25, really just provide some more specific detail for some of our select major utility projects and includes a little bit of spending in the 2016 and beyond time frame to show some future projects that we have planned. Slide 27. As I mentioned earlier, helping drive our earnings growth in '15 and in the 2014 as well is our Cheyenne Prairie Generating Station. Construction was completed there on October 1. As I said earlier, the plant was on time and on budget. A tremendous accomplishment for that jointly owned facility by Black Hills Power and Cheyenne Light. We had a fantastic safety record on the project as well with a total case incident rate of less than 0.9% and 0 lost time accidents, a pretty remarkable accomplishment by our generation construction group. Moving on to Slide 28. Another earnings growth opportunity we are presuming -- pursuing is a utility cost to service gas supply program or rate-basing of reserves, if you will. We discussed this initiative in more detail during our October 6 Analyst Day, and there was more information included in that Analyst Day deck, which is also on our Investor Relations tab of our website. We're in the process of meeting with utility commissioners, staffs and consumer advocates across our…

[Operator Instructions] And that comes from the line of Dan Eggers of Credit Suisse. Matthew Davis - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: It's actually Matt Davis. So just a question on the drilling program with being a little behind this year, and you're going to get the 3 wells, I guess, on producing sometime at the end of the year or in the first quarter. What's the confidence level being able to drill those additional 9 wells next year, not seeing an additional delay go kind of push into 2016? How are you kind of laying out that program across 2015?

Yes. We believe that we'll be able to take the drilling rig we have and just continue drilling in the spring on those next 6, Matt. So we don't think that our results this year will really have any significant impact on our plan for next year, barring any unforeseen circumstances. But our plan is to just continue to drill continuously until we finished all 12 of the 14 and 15 wells. Matthew Davis - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: And then, how many days of production do you look to get out of the well before you feel comfortable kind of putting that information out into the market? I know, we have discussed somewhere around 30, 60 or 90 days. I just kind of want to get a better feel for how much you felt comfortable with from those wells.

Yes. It really depends on the production behavior. Typically, once we get most of the frac water cleaned up, which can take 2 to 4 weeks just that part, another 30 days is usually reasonable. Sometimes, it takes more. It really depends on the individual well behavior. But once we get 30 to 60 days of good continuous relatively clean production, we're typically comfortable releasing that information. We may not be completely comfortable booking reserves yet, but sometimes we want to watch the decline behavior for a few months. But we would be comfortable putting out initial production once we get 30 to 60 days of good clean production history typically. Matthew Davis - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: So would that be around of -- that would be probably in the second quarter call, is that correct timing-wise for these wells that you guys are drilling right now?

Yes, possible. I mean, I'm hopeful we'll have a little bit of information in time for the first -- or the year-end call, if you will, that occurs in February. We just have to see how things go in completion operations. I think, as long as the weather holds, we might have some information by then. But realistically, most of it will be in the next quarter after that. Matthew Davis - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: So the first quarter, excuse me, per --

Yes. Matthew Davis - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: And then, can you just talk a little bit about the tax benefit that you had this year? And it -- kind of looking forward, if there's anything else so we can kind of be on the lookout for that could help you on your tax rate?

The tax rate, we've got 2009 and -- excuse me, 2007 through 2009 under examination right now. And so we've gone through it. We believe, we've got it recorded correctly. We have taken a certain position, and we were delighted that the IRS saw the position that we take -- took was accurate. But we probably weren't as confident of recording that expense related to that, and that's why we have the positive impact this quarter. So it's pretty hard to assess whether or not you're going to be up or down on the tax impact from an expense standpoint. We hover right in at that 34% rate though pretty consistently, 34%, 35%.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Matt Tucker of KeyBanc Capital Markets.

First question, on the guidance. I know you don't give guidance by segment, but could you just talk a little bit about the key drivers we should think about kind of underlying your growth assumptions for next year?

I think most of its related to all the activity we have with spending. We do expect a little more production on the Oil and Gas side. That number's included in the guidance, but we've got a lot of rate case activity that we're finishing up late in the year here. So maybe all the Cheyenne Prairie Generating Station, obviously, is one of the larger items, but we've got several rate cases. I think grand total, we will have completed 6 cases this year, early next year. So that's one of the biggest drivers, and a lot of investment in most of our utility is driving that.

That makes sense. And I guess, specifically, on Oil and Gas, can you give us a sense on how much [indiscernible] improvement you're expecting there? Or at least, do you expect it to be profitable in 2015?

Well, we're going to lose money in 2014 for Oil and Gas segment at the operating level, and we expect to reduce that loss quite a bit in 2015.

Got it. And your forecast also suggest pretty nice production growth next year. How much of that should we assume is driven by the 6 Mancos wells that you plan to drill this year?

Well, this year, the wells we plan to get on next year, I mean, that's going to be one -- a pretty significant driver. We do have some scattered drilling elsewhere that will contribute to production in a semi meaningful way, but the Mancos is going to drive a lot of it.

Got it. And shifting gears, could you give us the overall cumulative weather impact so far this year in terms of earnings or margin? Sorry, versus normal.

Yes. That's the $0.08 I talked about from the reminder in the earnings guidance that we have about $0.08 positive for the year due to weather.

Got it. My apologies, I missed that. And then just on the RFP in Colorado, could you comment on how many did you receive that were not from your Power Generation business?

No, we really can't. We've got a really strict internal wall between our bid evaluation team and the people who have knowledge of what we've submitted for bids. And so we did get a number of bids. I can share that much and in addition to our own, but a specific quantity and [indiscernible] I really don't know frankly and can't know at this stage. So...

Okay, fair enough. And then just on the wire deck coal price increase, could you tell us when exactly that took effect? And I believe you mentioned that a $300,000 improvement related to that. I just wanted to clarify, was that in terms of earnings?

Yes. That improved operating income in the third quarter, and the contract started July 1. We put in there that it improved the pricing by $4.75 per ton. The thing that you need to remember is that we're digging that stripping ratio that increased from 0.6 to 0.9. It's going to increase quite a bit again next year. So our cost will go up, but we'll still have quite an improvement in our per ton profitability on that contract.

The other thing to remember on coal prices is the royalty and tax burden is pretty heavy on that, and that comes off right off the top, typically runs in that 30% to 40% range. So that takes a big chunk right off the top of the increase.

Sure. And just one last follow-up since you mentioned the stripping ratio. It has remained somewhat stable this year while higher than last year, still significantly below where it was for several years prior to that. So you mentioned it increasing next year, how sharp of an increase should we expect? And does it kind of revert back to that 2x, 2x-plus type ratio almost immediately? Or is there more gradual ramp towards that type of ratio?

I think what you're going to see is you're going to see sort of the same type of deviation that we saw this year. So 0.6 to 0.9, you can expect it to -- went up 50% that it's probably going to be somewhere around there again next year.

Yes. One place you can look is in the Analyst Day deck that we showed you on October 6 and that webcast deck is on our website. It has a specific map that shows the overburden by year, and that'll give you real good sense. I think the strip ratio for next year, average is about 1 4, 1 5 -- 1.4, 1.5. But it's specifically on that slide in that Analyst Day deck, and that is listed for the next several years. So you can see how our overburden cost will be increasing there.

There are no further questions at the queue at this time. I would like hand the call back to David Emery for closing remarks.

All right. Well, thanks for your time and attention today, everyone. We appreciate your continued interest in Black Hills. We're excited about our quarter, and we're excited about our future opportunities. Thank you for your time and attention and your continued interest in the company. Have a great day.