The primary purpose of this project is to develop an understanding of the market for natural gas storage that will provide for rigorous evaluation of federal research and development opportunities in storage technologies. The project objectives are: (1) to identify market areas and end use sectors where new natural gas underground storage capacity can be economically employed; (2) to develop a storage evaluation system that will provide the analytical tool to evaluate storage requirements under alternate economic, technology, and market conditions; and (3) to analyze the economic and technical feasibility of alternatives to conventional gas storage. An analytical approach was designed to examine storage need and economics on a total U.S. gas system basis, focusing on technical and market issues. Major findings of each subtask are reported in detail. 79 figs.