12/20/2012 at 03:00 PM ET
Charley Gallay/Getty
Shiri Appleby is going to be a mom.
The actress and fiancé Jon Shook are expecting their first child this spring, PEOPLE confirms.
“Thank you for all the well wishes,” Appleby, 34, says. “We can’t wait to meet our little Baby Shook!”
Shook, a chef and owner at Los Angeles restaurant Animal, proposed to the actress in Italy in July.
Appleby, who recently had guest-starring roles on Chicago Fire and Franklin & Bash, is best known for playing Liz on Roswell.
She’ll next appear on the second season of Girls as a new love interest for Adam.
– Sarah Michaud
WASHINGTON (AP) — With steroids easy to buy, testing weak and punishments inconsistent, college football players are packing on significant weight — 30 pounds or more in a single year, sometimes — without drawing much attention from their schools or the NCAA in a sport that earns tens of billions of dollars for teams.
Rules vary so widely that, on any given game day, a team with a strict no-steroid policy can face a team whose players have repeatedly tested positive.
An investigation by The Associated Press — based on interviews with players, testers, dealers and experts and an analysis of weight records for more than 61,000 players — revealed that while those running the multibillion-dollar sport say they believe the problem is under control, that control is hardly evident.
The sport's near-zero rate of positive steroids tests isn't an accurate gauge among college athletes. Random tests provide weak deterrence and, by design, fail to catch every player using steroids. Colleges also are reluctant to spend money on expensive steroid testing when cheaper ones for drugs like marijuana allow them to say they're doing everything they can to keep drugs out of football.
"It's nothing like what's going on in reality," said Don Catlin, an anti-doping pioneer who spent years conducting the NCAA's laboratory tests at UCLA. He became so frustrated with the college system that it was part of the reason he left the testing industry to focus on anti-doping research.
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EDITOR'S NOTE — Whether for athletics or age, Americans from teenagers to baby boomers are trying to get an edge by illegally using anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, despite well-documented risks. This is the first of a two-part series.
___
While other major sports have been beset by revelations of steroid use, college football has operated with barely a whiff of scandal. Between 1996 and 2010 — the era of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong — the failure rate for NCAA steroid tests fell even closer to zero from an already low rate of less than 1 percent.
The AP's investigation, drawing upon more than a decade of official rosters from all 120 Football Bowl Subdivision teams, found thousands of players quickly putting on significant weight, even more than their fellow players. The information compiled by the AP included players who appeared for multiple years on the same teams.
For decades, scientific studies have shown that anabolic steroid use leads to an increase in body weight. Weight gain alone doesn't prove steroid use, but very rapid weight gain is one factor that would be deemed suspicious, said Kathy Turpin, senior director of sport drug testing for the National Center for Drug Free Sport, which conducts tests for the NCAA and more than 300 schools.
Yet the NCAA has never studied weight gain or considered it in regard to its steroid testing policies, said Mary Wilfert, the NCAA's associate director of health and safety.
The NCAA attributes the decline in positive tests to its year-round drug testing program, combined with anti-drug education and testing conducted by schools.
The AP's analysis found that, regardless of school, conference and won-loss record, many players gained weight at exceptional rates compared with their fellow athletes and while accounting for their heights.
Adding more than 20 or 25 pounds of lean muscle in a year is nearly impossible through diet and exercise alone, said Dan Benardot, director of the Laboratory for Elite Athlete Performance at Georgia State University.
In nearly all the rarest cases of weight gain in the AP study, players were offensive or defensive linemen, hulking giants who tower above 6-foot-3 and weigh 300 pounds or more. Four of those players interviewed by the AP said that they never used steroids and gained weight through dramatic increases in eating, up to six meals a day. Two said they were aware of other players using steroids.
"I ate 5-6 times a day," said Clint Oldenburg, who played for Colorado State starting in 2002 and for five years in the NFL. Oldenburg's weight increased over four years from 212 to 290.
Oldenburg told the AP he was surprised at the scope of steroid use in college football, even in Colorado State's locker room. "There were a lot of guys even on my team that were using." He declined to identify any of them.
The AP found more than 4,700 players — or about 7 percent of all players — who gained more than 20 pounds overall in a single year. It was common for the athletes to gain 10, 15 and up to 20 pounds in their first year under a rigorous regimen of weightlifting and diet. Others gained 25, 35 and 40 pounds in a season. In roughly 100 cases, players packed on as much 80 pounds in a single year.
In at least 11 instances, players that AP identified as packing on significant weight in college went on to fail NFL drug tests. But pro football's confidentiality rules make it impossible to know for certain which drugs were used and how many others failed tests that never became public.
Even though testers consider rapid weight gain suspicious, in practice it doesn't result in testing. Ben Lamaak, who arrived at Iowa State in 2006, said he weighed 225 pounds in high school. He graduated as a 320-pound offensive lineman and said he did it all naturally.
"I was just a young kid at that time, and I was still growing into my body," he said. "It really wasn't that hard for me to gain the weight. I love to eat."
In addition to random drug testing, Iowa State is one of many schools that have "reasonable suspicion" testing. That means players can be tested when their behavior or physical symptoms suggest drug use. Despite gaining 81 pounds in a year, Lamaak said he was never singled out for testing.
The associate athletics director for athletic training at Iowa State, Mark Coberley, said coaches and trainers use body composition, strength data and other factors to spot suspected cheaters. Lamaak, he said, was not suspicious because he gained a lot of "non-lean" weight.
But looking solely at the most significant weight gainers also ignores players like Bryan Maneafaiga.
In the summer of 2004, Bryan Maneafaiga was an undersized 180-pound running back trying to make the University of Hawaii football team. Twice — once in pre-season and once in the fall — he failed school drug tests, showing up positive for marijuana use but not steroids.
He'd started injecting stanozolol, a steroid, in the summer to help bulk up to a roster weight of 200 pounds. Once on the team, he'd occasionally inject the milky liquid into his buttocks the day before games.
"Food and good training will only get you so far," he told the AP recently.
Maneafaiga's former coach, June Jones, said it was news to him that one of his players had used steroids. Jones, who now coaches at Southern Methodist University, believes the NCAA does a good job rooting out steroid use.
On paper, college football has a strong drug policy. The NCAA conducts random, unannounced drug testing and the penalties for failure are severe. Players lose an entire year of eligibility after a first positive test. A second offense means permanent ineligibility for sports.
In practice, though, the NCAA's roughly 11,000 annual tests amount to a fraction of all athletes in Division I and II schools. Exactly how many tests are conducted each year on football players is unclear because the NCAA hasn't published its data for two years. And when it did, it periodically changed the formats, making it impossible to compare one year of football to the next.
Even when players are tested by the NCAA, experts like Catlin say it's easy enough to anticipate the test and develop a doping routine that results in a clean test by the time it occurs. NCAA rules say players can be notified up to two days in advance of a test, which Catlin says is plenty of time to beat a test if players have designed the right doping regimen. By comparison, Olympic athletes are given no notice.
Most schools that use Drug Free Sport do not test for anabolic steroids, Turpin said. Some are worried about the cost. Others don't think they have a problem. And others believe that since the NCAA tests for steroids their money is best spent testing for street drugs, she said.
Doping is a bigger deal at some schools than others.
At Notre Dame and Alabama, the teams that will soon compete for the national championship, players don't automatically miss games for testing positive for steroids. At Alabama, coaches have wide discretion. Notre Dame's student-athlete handbook says a player who fails a test can return to the field once the steroids are out of his system.
The University of North Carolina kicks players off the team after a single positive test for steroids. Auburn's student-athlete handbook calls for a half-season suspension for any athlete caught using performance-enhancing drugs.
At UCLA, home of the laboratory that for years set the standard for cutting-edge steroid testing, athletes can fail three drug tests before being suspended. At Bowling Green, testing is voluntary.
At the University of Maryland, students must get counseling after testing positive, but school officials are prohibited from disciplining first-time steroid users.
Only about half the student athletes in a 2009 NCAA survey said they believed school testing deterred drug use. As an association of colleges and universities, the NCAA could not unilaterally force schools to institute uniform testing policies and sanctions, Wilfert said.
"We can't tell them what to do, but if went through a membership process where they determined that this is what should be done, then it could happen," she said.
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Associated Press writers Ryan Foley in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; David Brandt in Jackson, Miss.; David Skretta in Lawrence, Kan.; Don Thompson in Sacramento, Calif., and Alexa Olesen in Shanghai, China, and researchers Susan James in New York and Monika Mathur in Washington contributed to this report.
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Contact the Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations (at) ap.org.
Whether for athletics or age, Americans from teenagers to baby boomers are trying to get an edge by illegally using anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, despite well-documented risks. This is the first of a two-part series.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks edged up in a thinly traded session on Thursday after Republican House Speaker John Boehner pledged to keep working on a solution to the "fiscal cliff" while still criticizing President Barack Obama's approach to budget talks.
NYSE Euronext
ICE shares were last down 0.7 percent at $127.40.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives pushed ahead with their own fiscal plan, complicating negotiations with the White House over a way to avoid a series of steep tax hikes and spending cuts due in early 2013. Obama has vowed to veto the plan.
Investors have hoped for an agreement soon between policymakers, but progress has been slow. Boehner said he expected to continue to work with Obama to find a solution, but repeated his charge that Obama and the Democrats were trying to "slow walk" the country over the fiscal cliff.
"Speaker Boehner went on the air and basically told us he doesn't like what the president's doing or not doing, and the markets rallied on that, which was kind of weird. But we have very light volume," said Stephen Guilfoyle, a trader at Meridian Equity Partners in New York.
About 4 billion shares had changed hands on major U.S. exchanges, a typically light day of trading for late December.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> advanced 27.94 points, or 0.21 percent, to 13,279.91. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> gained 5.51 points, or 0.38 percent, to 1,441.32. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> rose 5.44 points, or 0.18 percent, to 3,049.80.
Stocks rallied earlier in the week on signs of progress in the fiscal cliff negotiations, but with the S&P 500 up 14.6 percent so far this year, investors are taking the opportunity to engage in some hedging as 2012 comes to a close.
Herbalife
The S&P Financial Index <.gspf> gained 1.04 percent.
The U.S. economy grew 3.1 percent in the third quarter, faster than previously estimated, while the number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits rose more than expected in the latest week.
Existing home sales jumped 5.9 percent in November, more than expected, and by the fastest monthly pace in three years. An index of housing shares <.hgx> gained 0.43 percent.
But KB Home
(Additional reporting by Ryan Vlastelica and Leah Schnurr; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Nick Zieminski and Jan Paschal)
As my colleagues Chris Chivers, Tyler Hicks and Ben Solomon report in text, photographs and video, civilians are suffering from shortages of food and medicine, among other hardships, in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which is being torn apart in urban warfare between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.
But the city is also one of the Middle East’s most culturally and historically significant. Aleppo has been designated a World Heritage site since 1986, recognized for its ancient market, citadel and mosques, and the United Nations in recent months has called several times for its protection while emphasizing the tremendous toll the war has taken on civilians.
Many of Aleppo’s historical sites stand damaged by the fighting, perhaps irreparably, including the 17th-century market, or souk, in the Old City, which was engulfed by fire in September.
The contrast between the beauty of the city in more peaceful times and the damage that the fighting has wrought can be seen clearly on YouTube, in video of the souk before and after it became a battlefield.
By early October, as my colleague Anne Barnard reported, much of Aleppo’s historic center was in smoking ruins. Ancient stone walls had collapsed. The 12th-century citadel at the heart of the medieval city appeared to be damaged and government soldiers had taken up positions in the Umayyad Mosque, with snipers on the minaret.
After the fire swept through the ancient souk, Irina Bokova, the Unesco director-general, said in a statement:
The human suffering caused by this situation is already extreme. That the fighting is now destroying cultural heritage that bears witness to the country’s millenary history — valued and admired the world over — makes it even more tragic. The Aleppo souks have been a thriving part of Syria’s economic and social life since the city’s beginnings. They stand as testimony to Aleppo’s importance as a cultural crossroads since the second millennium B.C.
She made her remarks in October, deploring the damage to the Citadel, the Umayyad mosque and the “extreme human suffering” caused by the fighting.
Until the peaceful uprising spiraled into violence, Aleppo was a city for tourists, featured in The New York Times’s travel section in 2010. Tourism was up then, and the travel writer Lionel Beehner spoke glowingly about the mosques, the souk and the best reason to visit the Citadel: to take in the view of Aleppo’s minaret-dotted skyline.
Many have tried to capture what it means to a people to see their heritage destroyed. In one such attempt this month, Amal Hanano, a Syrian writer from Aleppo, also used the Citadel as an example, but this time of a city’s lost past, saying it was no longer a stage for impressing visitors but rather it had reclaimed its original purpose as a fortress.
Noting the deaths of more than 40,000 Syrians in less than two years of war, she wrote in a December article in Foreign Policy magazine:
But the death of a city is different. It is slow — each neighborhood’s death is documented bomb by bomb, shell by shell, stone by fallen stone. Witnessing the deaths of your cities is unbearable. Unlike the news of dead people — which arrives too late, always after the fact — the death of a city seems as if it can be halted, that the city can be saved from the clutches of destruction. But it is an illusion: The once-vibrant cities cannot be saved, so you watch, helpless, as they become ruins.
After a month-long delay, Nintendo (NTDOY) will launch its Nintendo TVii service for the Wii U on December 20th in the U.S. and Canada. Nintendo TVii is the company’s take on organizing all of the various video streaming and DVR services a user might subscribe to and then displaying them in an easy-to-navigate touchscreen-based interface on the Wii U GamePad. With Nintendo TVii, Nintendo hopes to make content discovery an easier task, rather than a chore. At the same time, Nintendo TVii will offer new “second-screen” experiences (similar to Xbox SmartGlass) with built-in social sharing options to Facebook (FB), Twitter and the Wii U console’s Miiverse.
[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 browser smokes iOS 6 and Windows Phone 8 in comparison test [video]]
[More from BGR: LG’s woeful comeback attempt]
Nintendo TVii will support Amazon (AMZN) Instant Video, Hulu Plus and cable and satellite providers on Thursday, but Netflix (NFLX) and TiVo (TIVO) support won’t hit the U.S. until “early 2013.” Nintendo didn’t state when TVii support for the latter two will hit Canada.
For the consumer’s sake, we hope the download for Nintendo TVii doesn’t take as long as past system updates.
Nintendo’s press release follows below.
Nintendo Makes TV Smart and Social – Nintendo TVii Launches Dec. 20
New Wii U Service Gives Every Member of the Family His or Her Own Personalized, Easy-to-Use Second-Screen Viewing Experience
REDMOND, Wash.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The company that changed how we play is about to change how we watch. On Dec. 20, Nintendo will introduce Nintendo TVii, a free, integrated service for the recently launched Wii U console that combines what you watch and how you watch into one seamless, second-screen experience on the revolutionary new Wii U GamePad controller.
The rapid increase in both the quality and availability of video entertainment content – hundreds of satellite and cable channels, a seemingly endless amount of video-on-demand options – has made finding something to watch a complex and occasionally frustrating process. The solution to this problem is coming from perhaps an unexpected place: a video game console.
“After Dec. 20, you’ll never look at your TV the same way again,” said Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime. “Wii U owners have already experienced the transformative effect that the GamePad has on game play and social interaction. Nintendo TVii shows how the integrated second screen of the GamePad can also transform and enhance the TV viewing experience. Welcome to the new world of TVii.”
Nintendo TVii maximizes Wii U owners’ current cable, satellite and video-on-demand services by pulling all of their available content sources – such as a Comcast cable package or Hulu Plus subscription – into one place. This empowers Wii U owners to focus on whatthey want to watch and not how they want to watch. And once users find the show, sporting event or movie they want, they press an icon and Nintendo TVii does the rest.
In addition to greatly simplifying finding and watching video content, Nintendo TVii also includes a series of social features that enable Wii U owners to share experiences and exciting moments with friends as they are happening on live TV. People can engage with others by commenting and sharing on Miiverse, Facebook and Twitter. Or they can comment, post or tweet about an incredible touchdown, a remarkable performance or a shocking plot twist, all using the personal screen of the Wii U GamePad.
Nintendo TVii requires no additional equipment and can be enjoyed with very little setup, demonstrating what’s possible when the second screen is truly integrated with the TV. Wii U owners can also discover more information about what they’re watching by easily accessing information on the GamePad via an Internet connection, including cast details, movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes and sports data such as live stats and scores.
Nintendo TVii launches in the United States and Canada on Dec. 20. At launch, the service will support cable and satellite providers in both regions, as well as direct integration with Amazon Instant Video and Hulu Plus subscriptions in the United States. Further integration with Netflix subscriptions and TiVo are expected in early 2013 in the United States. Wii U owners with a Netflix subscription can still access the Netflix application from the Wii U system’s main menu and enjoy their favorite content accordingly.
All elements of the Nintendo TVii service are included in the purchase price of the Wii U system. Users will define which services they currently subscribe to – including the channel lineup in their cable package and video-on-demand service subscriptions – as part of the setup process.
Nintendo TVii observes the Wii U system parental controls, and additional options specific to the Nintendo TVii features can be chosen in the Nintendo TVii settings. Every member of the family can create a different viewing profile. For more information about this and other features, visit http://www.nintendo.com/wiiu.
This article was originally published by BGR
Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Taylor Swift's cat Meredith is no trouble at all – just a fan.
"What's on the radio right now?" the Red singer asks her feline friend as her new single, "I Knew You Were Trouble," plays in the background of a video she posted Tuesday (watch above). "Is it my song?"
Her response: Meow! (We'll interpret that as an enthusiastic yes.)
"Isn't that exciting?" Swift asks to a seemingly understanding Meredith, whom she took home last November. Another meow. "Good talk."
Not that Meredith's just a fan. The cat, a regular fixture on Swift's Twitter feed, has a following of her own. "It's a crazy situation," she said in October. "Cause it's a cat."
Although we're guessing Meredith has a little competition now that her mom's dating One Direction singer Harry Styles, it's clear who the real fan is here. "She is awesome," Swift previously said. "She's, like, the most adorable cat in the world."
WASHINGTON (AP) — They might not want to talk about the gunshots or the screams. But their toys might start getting into imaginary shootouts.
Last week's school shooting in Connecticut raises the question: What will be the psychological fallout for the children who survived?
For people of any age, regaining a sense of security after surviving violence can take a long time. They're at risk for lingering anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder.
But after the grief and fear fades, psychiatrists say most of Newtown's young survivors probably will cope without long-term emotional problems.
"Kids do tend to be highly resilient," said Dr. Matthew Biel, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.
And one way that younger children try to make sense of trauma is through play. Youngsters may pull out action figures or stuffed animals and re-enact what they witnessed, perhaps multiple times.
"That's the way they gain mastery over a situation that's overwhelming," Biel explained, saying it becomes a concern only if the child is clearly distressed while playing.
Nor is it unusual for children to chase each other playing cops-and-robbers, but now parents might see some also pretending they're dead, added Dr. Melissa Brymer of the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.
Among the challenges will be spotting which children are struggling enough that they may need professional help.
Newtown's tragedy is particularly heart-wrenching because of what such young children grappled with — like the six first-graders who apparently had to run past their teacher's body to escape to safety.
There's little scientific research specifically on PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, in children exposed to a burst of violence, and even less to tell if a younger child will have a harder time healing than an older one.
Overall, scientists say studies of natural disasters and wars suggest most children eventually recover from traumatic experiences while a smaller proportion develop long-term disorders such as PTSD. Brymer says in her studies of school shootings, that fraction can range from 10 percent to a quarter of survivors, depending on what they actually experienced. A broader 2007 study found 13 percent of U.S. children exposed to different types of trauma reported some symptoms of PTSD, although less than 1 percent had enough for an official diagnosis.
Violence isn't all that rare in childhood. In many parts of the world — and in inner-city neighborhoods in the U.S., too — children witness it repeatedly. They don't become inured to it, Biel said, and more exposure means a greater chance of lasting psychological harm.
In Newtown, most at risk for longer-term problems are those who saw someone killed, said Dr. Carol North of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who has researched survivors of mass shootings.
Friday's shootings were mostly in two classrooms of Sandy Hook Elementary School, which has about 450 students through fourth-grade.
But those who weren't as close to the danger may be at extra risk, too, if this wasn't their first trauma or they already had problems such as anxiety disorders that increase their vulnerability, she said.
Right after a traumatic event, it's normal to have nightmares or trouble sleeping, to stick close to loved ones, and to be nervous or moody, Biel said.
To help, parents will have to follow their child's lead. Grilling a child about a traumatic experience isn't good, he stressed. Some children will ask a lot of questions, seeking reassurance, he said. Others will be quiet, thinking about the experience and maybe drawing or writing about it, or acting it out at playtime. Younger children may regress, becoming clingy or having tantrums.
Before second grade, their brains also are at a developmental stage some refer to as magical thinking, when it's difficult to distinguish reality and fantasy. Parents may have to help them understand that a friend who died isn't in pain or lonely but also isn't coming back, Brymer said.
When problem behaviors or signs of distress continue for several weeks, Brymer says it's time for an evaluation by a counselor or pediatrician.
Besides a supportive family, what helps? North advises getting children back into routines, together with their friends, and easing them back into a school setting. Studies of survivors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks found "the power of the support of the people who went through it with you is huge," she said.
Children as young as first-graders can benefit from cognitive-behavioral therapy, Georgetown's Biel said. They can calm themselves with breathing techniques. They also can learn to identify and label their feelings — anger, frustration, worry — and how to balance, say, a worried thought with a brave one.
Finally, avoid watching TV coverage of the shooting, as children may think it's happening all over again, Biel added. He found that children who watched the 9/11 clips of planes hitting the World Trade Center thought they were seeing dozens of separate attacks.
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EDITOR'S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell on Wednesday as talks to avert a fiscal crisis by the end of the year turned sour following recent progress, even as the market's moderate decline points to expectations that a deal will be reached.
President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans are struggling to come up with a deal to avoid early 2013 tax hikes and spending cuts that many economists say could pull the U.S. economy back into recession.
House Speaker John Boehner said his chamber will pass a proposal that Obama had already threatened to veto as it spares many wealthy Americans from tax hikes needed to balance the budget. Obama has already agreed to reductions in benefits for senior citizens.
"My guess is they're close to a deal, and right before, it looks like the deal is about to blow up either on manufactured or legitimate reasons," said Uri Landesman, president of hedge fund Platinum Partners in New York.
He said if the market thought the deal was off, the S&P 500 would slide below 1,400. It stands now near 1,440, nor far from a two-month high.
The CBOE volatility index <.vix> surged 10.2 percent to trade above 17, but has remained relatively stable. Its 14- 50- and 200-day averages are all within 1.2 points.
Landesman said the VIX's stability indicates "the bulls have control of this market still."
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> fell 63.01 points, or 0.47 percent, to 13,287.95. The S&P 500 <.spx> lost 7.77 points, or 0.59 percent, to 1,439.02. The Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> dropped 4.97 points, or 0.16 percent, to 3,049.56.
General Motors
Banks and energy shares - groups that outperform during periods of economic expansion - have led recent gains, indicating a shift to focusing on a growing economy as Wall Street looks past the budget talks.
The S&P 500 added 2.3 percent over the past two sessions, the first time it has marked two straight days of 1 percent gains since late July.
Defensive sectors led the downside on Wednesday, with the S&P health care sector index <.gspa> down 0.9 percent.
Oracle
Knight Capital Group Inc
Data showed homebuilding permits touched their highest level in nearly 4-1/2 years in November. The PHLX housing index <.hgx> fell 0.6 percent, but is up nearly 70 percent this year as the housing market has turned the corner.
(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Jan Paschal)
Oryx
The Oryx natural gas processing plant in Qatar, where Sasol is converting natural gas to diesel fuel.
RAS LAFFAN INDUSTRIAL CITY, Qatar — The compact assembly of towers, tubes and tanks that make up the Oryx natural gas processing plant is almost lost in a vast petrochemical complex that rises here like a hazy mirage from a vast ocean of sand.
A blog about energy and the environment.
The Sasol plant in Qatar makes 32,000 barrels of liquid fuels daily. Experts say the economics of the process are challenged.
But what is occurring at Oryx is a particular kind of alchemy that has tantalized scientists for nearly a century with prospects of transforming the energy landscape. Sasol, a chemical and synthetic fuels company based in South Africa, is converting natural gas to diesel fuel using a variation of a technology developed by German scientists in the 1920s.
Performing such chemical wizardry is exceedingly costly. But executives at Sasol and a partner, Qatar’s state-owned oil company, are betting that natural gas, which is abundant here, will become the dominant global fuel source over the next 50 years, oil will become scarcer and more expensive and global demand for transport fuels will grow.
Sasol executives say the company believes so strongly in the promise of this technology that this month, it announced plans to spend up to $14 billion to build the first gas-to-liquids plant in the United States, in Louisiana, supported by more than $2 billion in state incentives. A shale drilling boom in that region in the last five years has produced a glut of cheap gas, and the executives say Sasol can tap that supply to make diesel and other refined products at competitive prices.
Marjo Louw, president of Sasol Qatar, says that his company can produce diesel fuel that burns cleaner, costs less and creates less greenhouse gas pollution than fuel derived from crude oil.
“We believe the planets are aligned for G.T.L.,” Mr. Louw said during a recent tour of the Oryx plant. “Other players — much bigger players — will follow.”
Perhaps. So far, however, the record for converting gas to liquids is spotty.
The newest and largest plant in operation, Royal Dutch Shell’s giant Pearl plant, also in Qatar, cost the leviathan sum of $19 billion, more than three times its original projected cost, and has been plagued with unexpected maintenance problems. BP and ConocoPhillips built and briefly operated demonstration plants in Alaska and Oklahoma, but stopped short of full development of the technology. Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips announced plans to build giant plants in Qatar, but backed out, putting their capital instead into terminals to export liquefied natural gas.
Today only a handful of gas-to-liquids plants operate commercially, in Malaysia, South Africa and Qatar. Together they produce only a bit more than 200,000 barrels of fuels and lubricants a day — equivalent to less than 1 percent of global diesel demand.
“The reason you see so few G.T.L. plants is the economics are challenged at best,” said William M. Colton, Exxon Mobil’s vice president of corporate strategic planning. “We do not see it being a relevant source of fuels over the next 20 years.”
Many analysts and industry insiders say the technology makes sense only when oil and gas supplies and prices are far out of balance, as they are today in Qatar and the United States. When oil and gas come into alignment, gas-to-liquids ventures will become white elephants, these skeptics say. Environmentalists also say that the huge energy inputs required to transform natural gas into diesel or other fuels negate any greenhouse gas benefits.
Until recently, the method used to convert natural gas or coal to liquid fuel — known as the Fischer-Tropsch process after the Germans who invented it — had been used only by pariah nations desperate for transportation fuels when they had little or no oil available. For decades, South Africa defended its system of apartheid from international oil embargoes by producing synthetic oil from its rich coal resources. Nazi Germany did the same to fuel its military machine in World War II.
But with North Africa and the Middle East chronically unstable and natural gas cheap and plentiful in the United States, some say the technology is now an enticing option to produce various fuels without importing a drop of oil.
Shell may soon announce a tentative site for a gas-to-liquids plant on the Gulf Coast of the United States. Given what the company learned from its Qatar plant, executives say it would reduce costs in any new one by using different types of valves and alloys.
But Ken Lawrence, Shell’s vice president for investor relations in North America, said the company was still two years away from a final decision on an American plant.
That leaves Sasol in the forefront of the gas-to-liquids effort.
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