Good morning. My name is Eva and I will be your conference facilitator. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the MDU Resources Group Third Quarter 2012 conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. (Operator Instructions) This call will be available for replay, beginning at 2:00 p.m. ET today, through 11:59 p.m. ET on November 15. The conference ID number for the replay is 34753792, again the conference ID number for the replay is 34753792. The number to dial-in for the replay is 1855-859-2056 or 404-537-3406. I would now like to turn the conference over the Doran Schwartz, Vice President and Chief financial officer of MDU Resources Group. Thank you, Mr. Schwartz, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, and welcome to our earnings release conference call. For those of you who are dealing with the aftermath of storm Sandy our sincerest thoughts are with you for a return to some normalcy in the days ahead. And before I turn the presentation over the Terry Hildestad, our President and Chief Executive Officer, I would like to mention that this conference call is being broadcast live to the public over the internet and slides will accompany or remarks. If you’d would like to view the slides go to our website at www.mdu.com and follow the link to the conference call. Our earnings release is also available on our website. Now during the course of this presentation. We will make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of section 21 of the securities exchange act of 1934. Although the company believes that its expectations and beliefs are based on reasonable assumptions actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that may cause actual results therefore refer to item 1A Risk Factors in our most recent Form 10-K and a Risk Factors section in our most recent form 8-K. Our format today will include formal remarks by Terry, followed by a Q&A session. Other members of our management team who will be available to answer questions during the Q&A session of the conference call today are, Steve Bietz - President & CEO, WBI Energy, Dave Goodin, President & CEO of Montana Dakota, Great Plains Natural Gas, Cascade Natural Gas and Intermountain Gas; John Harp, CEO of Knife River Corporation and MDU Construction Services; Kent Wells, President & CEO of Fidelity Exploration & Production; Bill Schneider, Executive Vice President of Bakken Development and Nicole Kivisto, Vice President, Controller & Chief Accounting Officer for MDU Resources. And with that I’ll turn the presentation over to Terry, for his formal remarks. Terry?

Thank you, Doran, and good morning. Thank you for joining us today to discuss third quarter results. We had a good quarter with a strength of our diversified group of companies we were able to generate solid earnings growth for the quarter, even though we realize lower natural gas and oil prices in the prior year. Our construction businesses continued to experience upward momentum and our utility business had another solid quarter driven by further growth in the Bakken. We experienced some delays in planned drilling during the third quarter, however, we’re seeing strong results from wells coming on line late in the quarter, and so far in the fourth quarter. Absent the non-cash charged earnings per share increased 12% compared to the last year. We reported consolidated earnings of $71.1 million or $0.38 per share compared the earnings of $63.8 million or $0.34 per share last year. We have revised our annual 2012 earnings guidance to a range of $1.05 to $1.20 and this is from $1.00 to $1.25 previously. This range excludes the effects of this quarter’s non-cash charges as well as the arbitration charge reversal from the second quarter this year. Now moving on to our individual operations, I’ll start with our construction materials and service companies, we’re very pleased with the results of this group in the third quarter. Combined earnings for the Group were $51.8 million that’s a 36% increase over the last year, on 6% revenue growth. We experienced higher construction workloads and margins as well as improved volumes and margins in our asphalt, oil and ready-mix concrete product lines. Our specialty equipment manufacturing sales, and rental division had another solid quarter with an increased earnings contribution. In addition our SG&A costs were down for our combined construction businesses. The Bakken is at the…

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Chris Ellinghaus with Williams Capital.

Can you give us any idea how much you’re curtailing intentionally on gas production?

Yeah, Chris this is Kent. We’ve got roughly 20 million to 25 million a day, that we’ve shut in and we focused on our dry gas fields, Baker, Bowdoin in the [coalbed].

Okay. And can you give us a little bit color – I am sorry go ahead.

Go ahead, Chris.

The construction businesses looked much better this quarter, can you give us a little more color on what you’re seeing out there?

Well, it’s the nice thing that we see this quarter is we see both the top line and the bottom line growing, and that’s always a good sign to get growth in the revenue side, and more importantly take us a 6% growth but more importantly increase your earnings by 36%. And then the other thing that we disclose as you’re starting to see an uptick in the private work, and obviously that scenario where particularly in the material side of the business it’s really hampered our ability to produce their earnings that we’d like. So we’re – I think we’re in a good position I mean the interest that we’ve always talked about is our workforce in our people, we’ve had 8,000 plus workforce out there in the last three months that have really produced, I think, our customers were happy with our work, we continue to try to improve our reputation in our brand and so we’re cautiously optimistic going into next year.

Okay. And what’s going on in the private side can you give us a little color there, it seems like maybe things have turned a corner?

Yeah, there is – it’s a all over the map, I mean obviously that we’re starting to see some residential work come up in some small pockets. The other thing we’re trying to do, if you look at some niche work tailings and gold mines and areas where we think we can move our margins a little better. And so it’s a combination of the private work and also we’ve been very happy on the construction services side our Equipment Division and our supply business continues to grow. So it’s there is signs I mean I think there is a lot of money setting out the sidelines and have been for two or three years and the thing about construction, construction is built on one word and the word is confidence. And if the confidence starts to comeback in the marketplace with our cost structure and the 8,000 people that we’re working for us right now, we’re in a very good position.

Okay. And one more thing, can you give us some sense of what your return expectations are for midstream asset investments?

Chris, this is Steve Bietz, from a return perspective it really goes project by project, I think, you’ve got to look at the risk associated with each of those projects and goes to some of the contractual terms that you have underlying those certainly we would look at a regulated type of return is a floor and can move up from there.

Okay, great. Thanks a lot guys, appreciate it.

Thanks, Chris.

Your next question comes from Paul Ridzon with KeyBanc.

Hello good morning, Paul.

Sorry, if construction takes off what your degree of confidence that you can hold the SG&A line or is that need to expand to meet the new business?

Well, Paul if you know anything about me, I’ve always had a pretty good hand on my cost and my overhead and so to tell you that we’re going to move those cost for any uptick actually I think we have some slack in our ability to increase sales without increasing SG&A, I think we’re right now probably in pretty good position on our SG&A but I think we can have nice uptick without driving those costs because we are very focused company on cost and performance and one of the things we talk about, we talk in our business with Kennish as I mentioned to you guys in Denver we’re interested and picking up that penny. So we’re looking at areas that we’re waking manage our cost and deliver good efficiencies and good productivity, so I think we can manage that SG&A will watch it very closely, we’ve got people that look at that daily via dashboards that we monitor and we’re really pay attention to our costs because I believe if you don’t know your cost you can’t be in business.

As we move to more private component of the business mix, what do you see the opportunities from margin expansion?

Well, (Inaudible) in a pudding and let us deliver some results and then I will be comfortable talking to you about it but my bottom line that if that opportunity comes and we see some continuing improvement in that private sector, I like our players, I like our people, I like our performance those opportunities out there, we’re going to execute on them and I think the shareholder will benefit.

And pockets in Bakken what the growth looks like at construction?

Well, the Bakken is a big part of MDU, when you look at everything that we offer out there it’s a broad range of services, but we see pockets in other parts of the country starting to develop and come back I mean we’re starting that such a low thresholds that any uptick, is going to be positive just because of if you’ve looked at our revenues where they were in our earnings back to 2008 versus where they’re at today, we’re basically about half where we were. So we think I’m -- that we have the opportunity with any type of improvement in the economy to benefit from that but it’s not just the Bakken but Bakken is a very important part of that, it’s certainly helped our material side of the business but we think there is other pockets that with any confidence coming back and is a private sector, I think we’re in good position.

Is there growth excluding Bakken?

Yes, I mean there are growth in our private work was not just Bakken driven we had to have other areas that we show some improvements, again very good growth if you look at our Construction Services Group, we almost doubled our earnings 100% increase I mean those are positive signs that something good as happening out there.

Thank you very much.

This marks the last call for question. (Operator Instructions) This call will be available for replay beginning at 2:00 p.m. Eastern today through to 11:59 p.m. Eastern on November 15th. The conference ID number for the replay is 34753792. Again, the conference ID number for the replay is 34753792. At this time there are no further questions. I would now like to turn the conference back over to management for closing remarks.

Thank you. We expect to be providing our assumptions for 2013 at our year-end report that occurs in early February, we certainly appreciate all of your participation on the call today we look forward to have an opportunity to speak with you soon. So thank you again for your interest in MDU Resources.

This concludes today’s MDU Resources Group conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.