California parks officials improperly boosted pay, audit finds

SACRAMENTO — Managers at the California parks department circumvented payroll policies and boosted salaries improperly, the state controller said Tuesday.

Controller John Chiang said the payouts were made with "deliberate disregard for internal controls, along with little oversight and poorly trained staff. When security protocols and authorization requirements so easily can be overridden, it invites the abuse of public funds."

Chiang said that bad record keeping in the department made it impossible to determine a total for the amount of money improperly paid.

The payroll issues are coming to light months after revelations last summer that parks officials had a hidden $54-million surplus at a time when the department was cutting services and threatening to close parks. Disclosure of unused funds led to the ouster of department Director Ruth Coleman.

The payroll problems took many forms, the controller's office said. One involved "out of class" payments, which is extra money paid to employees for handling duties outside their regular responsibilities. Over a three-year period, 203 employees received a total of $520,000 for such work, but a lack of documentation prevented officials from determining how much of those payments were improper, the office said.

In another example, several temporary employees were allowed to exceed their annual ceiling of 1,500 hours of work.

The parks department conceded Tuesday that it had made errors.

"We acknowledge and it is widely known that some very unfortunate events occurred at the Department of Parks and Recreation, in particular with the mismanagement of payroll systems and data," spokesman Roy Stearns said. The department is using the controller's findings to "continue to improve and safeguard our payroll systems," he said.

Stearns said officials would try to have employees return any overpayments.

Last month, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed a retired Marine general, Anthony Jackson, to replace Coleman as director. Jackson is awaiting Senate approval.

"We see these audits and investigations as a catalyst for change," Jackson said in a statement. He said the department will "work diligently to earn back the trust of our fellow state agencies and the people of the state of California."

The state Department of Finance is conducting its own audit of the parks department. Spokesman H.D. Palmer said the findings could be released before the end of the year.

chris.megerian@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 19

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

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Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

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Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Cassadee Pope wins Season 3 of ‘The Voice’

NEW YORK (AP) — Cassadee Pope, who was country singer Blake Shelton‘s protege on the third season of NBC‘s “The Voice,” has won the show’s competition.

The 23-year-old singer is stepping out into a solo career after performing with a band called Hey Monday. Her victory over Scottish native Terry McDermott and long-bearded Nicholas David was announced at the end of a two-hour show Tuesday.

“The Voice” has grown into a hit for NBC and was the key factor in the network’s surprising success this fall.

The show’s status was affirmed by the stream of hitmakers who performed on the finale. They included Rihanna, Bruno Mars, the Killers, Smokey Robinson and Peter Frampton.

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Attackers in Pakistan Kill Anti-Polio Workers

Athar Hussain/Reuters

Relatives of Nasima Bibi, a worker in a polio vaccination drive, at a hospital morgue in Karachi.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Gunmen shot dead five female health workers who were immunizing children against polio on Tuesday, causing the Pakistani government to suspend vaccinations in two cities and dealing a fresh setback to an eradication campaign dogged by Taliban resistance in a country that is one of the disease’s last global strongholds.

“It is a blow, no doubt,” said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, an adviser on polio to Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf. “Never before have female health workers been targeted like this in Pakistan. Clearly there will have to be more and better arrangements for security.”

No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but most suspicion focused on the Pakistani Taliban, which has previously blocked polio vaccinators and complained that the United States is using the program as a cover for espionage.

The killings were a serious reversal for the multibillion-dollar global polio immunization effort, which over the past quarter century has reduced the number of endemic countries from 120 to just three: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Nonetheless, United Nations officials insisted that the drive would be revived after a period for investigation and regrouping, as it had been after previous attacks on vaccinators here, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Pakistan has made solid gains against polio, with 56 new recorded cases of the diseases in 2012, compared with 192 at the same point last year, according to the government. Worldwide, cases of death and paralysis from polio have been reduced to less than 1,000 last year, from 350,000 worldwide in 1988.

But the campaign here has been deeply shaken by Taliban threats and intimidation, though several officials said Tuesday that they had never seen such a focused and deadly attack before.

Insurgents have long been suspicious of polio vaccinators, seeing them as potential spies. But that greatly intensified after the C.I.A. used a vaccination team headed by a local doctor, Shakil Afridi, to visit Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, reportedly in an attempt to obtain DNA proof that the Bin Laden family was there before an American commando raid on it in May 2011.

In North Waziristan, one prominent warlord has banned polio vaccinations until the United States ceases drone strikes in the area.

Most new infections in Pakistan occur in the tribal belt and adjoining Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province — some of the most remote areas of the country, and also those with the strongest militant presence. People fleeing fighting in those areas have also spread the disease to Karachi, the country’s largest city, where the disease has been making a worrisome comeback in recent years.

After Tuesday’s attacks, witnesses described violence that was both disciplined and well coordinated. Five attacks occurred within an hour in different Karachi neighborhoods. In several cases, the killers traveled in pairs on motorcycle, opening fire on female health workers as they administered polio drops or moved between houses in crowded neighborhoods.

Of the five victims, three were teenagers, and some had been shot in the head, a senior government official said. Two male health workers were also wounded by gunfire; early reports incorrectly stated that one of them had died, the official said.

In Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, gunmen opened fire on two sisters participating in the polio vaccination program, killing one of them. It was unclear whether that shooting was directly linked to the Karachi attacks.

In remote parts of the northwest, the Taliban threat is exacerbated by the government’s crumbling writ. In Bannu, on the edge of the tribal belt, one polio worker, Noor Khan, said he quit work on Tuesday once news of the attacks in Karachi and Peshawar filtered in.

“We were told to stop immediately,” he said by phone.

Still, the Pakistani government has engaged considerable political and financial capital in fighting polio. President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa have been at the forefront of immunization drives. With the help of international donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they have mounted a huge vaccination campaign aimed at up to 35 million children younger than 5, usually in three-day bursts that can involve 225,000 health workers.

The plan seeks to have every child in Pakistan immunized at least four times per year, although in the hardest-hit areas one child could be reached as many as 12 times in a year.

Declan Walsh reported from Islamabad, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan.

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Getco Wins Knight With $2 Billion Sweetened Offer-Sources

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Getco Holding Company LLC will buy Knight Capital Group for about $2 billion (1.2 billion pounds) after sweetening its offer for the equities market-making firm to beat out rival Virtu Financial LLC, people close to the deal said.

Getco clinched the deal after it increased the amount of cash in its cash-and-stock offer that will essentially see it merge into Knight to create a new publicly traded company, the sources said.

The deal seals a whirlwind five months for Knight after a near-fatal trading error on August 1. The company, which executes about 10 percent of U.S. equity trading volume, making it a vital cog in the stock trading system, had to be rescued by a $400 million injection from a group of investors led by Jefferies Group Inc and including Chicago-based Getco.

The deal is two-thirds cash and values Knight at $3.75 a share, the sources said.

Getco, an electronic trading firm that often competes against Knight, will borrow $1 billion to execute the deal, they said, adding that Knight's board had accepted the terms after the markets closed on Tuesday.

Knight and Virtu declined to comment.

Getco had originally offered $3.50 a share for Knight in an unsolicited bid that was 50 percent cash, and was helped by an infusion from private equity firm General Atlantic, one of its biggest investors.

Knight shares rose 5.1 percent to $3.50 in after-hours trading on the New York Stock Exchange after closing at $3.33.

"We never dreamed this would come about so quickly," said Curt Bradbury, chief operating officer of Stephens, a Little Rock Arkansas broker-dealer that took part in Knight's rescue.

"On the surface, the deals looks good, and I'm looking forward to taking a closer look. We appreciate the board's effort at sorting this out."

Jefferies, which agreed earlier this year to be bought by Leucadia National Corp, worked with Getco on the deal and is helping it with financing. At one point during the negotiations, Jefferies' role raised concerns among some at Knight about whether the investment bank was trying to push a sale to make a quick buck. A Jefferies spokesman declined to comment.

Other investors involved in the rescue included Blackstone Group LP, TD Ameritrade Holding Corp, Stifel Financial. General Atlantic, Blackstone and TD Ameritrade took seats following the rescue on Knight's board.

NEW EXECUTIVE TEAM

Both Getco and Virtu coveted Knight's U.S. market-making business, which uses computer models to match buy and sell orders in stocks and options. Knight's market-making has remained profitable despite a market-wide slump in equities volume, though its profits have been eroded by ventures into other areas.

Knight also runs bond and foreign exchange trading platforms, and owns a reverse mortgage lender as well as a stake of about 20 percent in Direct Edge, the No. 4 U.S. cash equities exchange.

Getco is expected to divest most of Knight's noncore assets, the sources said.

The latest discussions started after Getco made an unsolicited bid late last month for Knight, which was followed by Virtu's bid, also unsolicited.

Under Getco's proposal, Knight Chief Executive Thomas Joyce will step down from that role, but will remain as executive chairman of the combined company. Getco's Daniel Coleman will become the CEO of the combined firm.

Knight's board was initially split on the relative merits of the competing bids, the sources said.

Virtu this week boosted its all-cash bid to $3.20 a share, one of the sources said, leaving Knight to weigh the value of cash against what stock in a newly combined Getco-Knight would be worth.

Knight's directors were also divided over the future management and financial health of the company, sources said.

The board questioned Getco's motivations, worrying that, with its profit down 60 percent this year, it was scrambling to find a stronger partner, one source said.

The board also had questions about Virtu's debt load, another source said. Virtu had lined up some financing for its bid from private equity firm Silver Lake, a Virtu investor.

One concern for brokerages such as TD Ameritrade was whether the new owner would continue to pay discount brokers to route orders through Knight in order to create liquidity for the market, the sources said. That also became a point of discussion for Knight's board as it debated the rival bids, they said.

On August 1, Knight's errant software sent millions of unintentional orders in almost 150 stocks in the opening 45 minutes of the U.S. trading session.

Knight ended up selling the shares it purchased at a large discount to Goldman Sachs Group Inc, leading to a $461.1 million loss that overwhelmed the $365 million of cash on its books. In the wake of the debacle, its stock, which had traded at a high of $13.59 this year, fell to as low as $2.58.

(Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Andrew Hay, Gunna Dickson and Edwina Gibbs)

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Adam Lanza's family had kept a watchful eye on him

STAMFORD, Conn. — When the parents of Adam Lanza divorced, the settlement left Nancy Lanza with $24,150 a month in alimony payments and able to live a comfortable life and care for her troubled son.

Nancy Lanza, 52, was her son's first victim Friday, shot to death in the spacious homethey shared, authorities said. Adam, 20, then took his mother's car to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he shot his way into the building and opened fire, killing 20 children and six adults before turning a gun on himself.

New details emerged Monday about how Adam Lanza's family and the staff at his high school kept a watchful eye over the reserved boy, who seemed to spend much of his time in solitude after finishing high school.

PHOTOS: Sandy Hook shootings

Friends of the family said he suffered from Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. As early as age 10, Adam Lanza was taking medication, according to his former baby sitter, Ryan Kraft, now an aerospace engineer in Hermosa Beach.

"I know there was something administered. I'm not sure what," he said. There were never any signs that Lanza was dangerous, he said. "There were no red flags that would say something like this would happen."

Nancy Lanza cautioned Kraft to never let him out of his sight, even briefly. "The instructions were to always supervise him visually," he said.

FULL COVERAGE: Sandy Hook shootings

That echoed recollections from others who said Nancy Lanza was a constant presence in her son's life. "She truly cared for both of her sons deeply," said Amanda d'Ambrose, 23, whose brother befriended Adam Lanza in high school. "I just want the world to know what a beautiful soul that she is."

John Wlasuk, who played Babe Ruth baseball with Lanza as a youth, said the boy's mother was "always at the games, always really involved with her kids."

Wlasuk said he sometimes went to the Lanza house with his father, a plumber, who told him of the room in the basement where Lanza spent a lot of time playing video games. As Wlasuk's father described it, the room had posters of military weaponry, and Lanza would be playing violent video games such as "Call of Duty."

"I wouldn't say it was a shrine to the military or anything, a couple of posters with a bed and a desk and a computer," he said.

Richard Novia, who formerly advised the Newtown High Schooltechclub that was one of Lanza's few social outlets, said Lanza had been placed in a special program for students who were considered at risk of being bullied — though he had no recollection of Lanza being harassed.

Novia said he was told that Lanza had a medical condition that hindered his ability to feel pain, so that if he cut himself or stubbed his toe, he might not even know he was hurt and could continue to harm himself.

When Lanza was in elementary school, his mother fretted about his schooling.

"She was concerned mainly that Adam wasn't fitting in well in his classroom," said Wendy Wipprecht, whose son had also been diagnosed with a form of autism. She said Nancy Lanza considered moving her son to a private Catholic school, orhomeschooling him, but did not join sessions of any of the local autism parents' support groups that Wipprecht attended.

"She may have decided that there wasn't a support group that would fit," Wipprecht said. "Who knows. She may have been overwhelmed."

There is no mention of Adam Lanza's emotional troubles or any domestic strife in his parents' divorce papers. Last week, Ryan Lanza told investigators that the divorce could have had an effect on his younger brother.

Peter and Nancy Lanza married in 1981 in New Hampshire. She sued her husband for divorce in 2008, citing irreconcilable differences.

In their 2009 settlement, Nancy and Peter Lanza agreed to joint custody of Adam, then 17, who would live with his mother but have regular visits from his father. In addition to the alimony, Peter Lanza would cover the children's medical insurance.

Court records show that Nancy Lanza was due to receive $289,800 in alimony in 2012, or $24,150 each month. Peter Lanza, an executive at General Electric who was earning an annual salary of about $445,000 in 2009, also would pay for both their sons' college and graduate school educations and for a car for Adam.

The street where Nancy Lanza and her son lived was reopened by police Monday. The borders of the grassy, tree-lined hill it sits on are still cordoned off with yellow police tape.

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

molly-hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

kim.murphy@latimes.com

Bengali and Hennessy-Fiske reported from Newtown, Conn., and Murphy from Seattle.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 18

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Participant Media plans cable TV network targeting millenials

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Entertainment company Participant Media, one of the backers of the hit historical drama “Lincoln”, will launch a cable TV network next summer with programming that focuses on social issues of interest to the millenials generation of teens and young adults.

The channel’s original programming, films and documentaries will be aimed at viewers age 18 to 34 in the large demographic group known as millenials, Participant Media CEO Jim Berk said in an interview on Monday.

Millenials are particularly interested in the type of content that Participant produces about social issues, Berk said. The studio’s credits include the current release “Lincoln”, about President Abraham Lincoln‘s push to ban slavery, last year’s civil rights drama “The Help” and Al Gore climate change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Participant Media is creating the new network by purchasing two existing cable channels, The Documentary Channel and Halogen TV. After those networks are combined and rebranded, the new channel will reach an estimated 40 million of the more than 100 million U.S. pay-TV subscribers.

The company, founded by billionaire and former eBay Inc President Jeff Skoll with the aim of producing entertaining content that inspires social change, interacts regularly with more than 2.5 million people through social media, local movie screenings and its Takepart.com website, Berk said.

The challenge for Participant will be to sign up additional pay-TV distributors and win viewership in a crowded media landscape. The company is privately held and is not part of a large media conglomerate.

“We have the funding necessary to take a very long-term view, and to spend what we need to spend in terms of programming,” Berk said.

The mainstay of the network’s lineup will be original programming from a variety of genres, said Evan Shapiro, a Participant executive who will run the new network.

The company is developing programming with established Hollywood names including former MTV President Brian Graden, “Inconvenient Truth” director Davis Guggenheim and documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.

Participant also hopes to work with pay-TV distributors to make the channel’s content available on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, to meet the viewing patterns of younger audiences, Shapiro said.

(Reporting By Lisa Richwine; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

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N.I.H. to Start Initiatives to Raise Number of Minority Scientists

Few blacks enter biomedical research, and those who do often encounter obstacles in their career paths.

A study published last year found that a black scientist was markedly less likely to obtain research money from the National Institutes of Health than a white one — even when differences of education and stature were taken into account.

The institute has now announced initiatives aimed at helping blacks and other ethnic and racial groups who have been unrepresented among medical researchers, including a pilot program that will test a grant review process in which all identifying information about the applicant is removed.

The initiatives take a step further than addressing the problem identified in the study — the goal is to entice more minorities into the field.

“It needed to go well beyond that,” said Francis S. Collins, director of the N.I.H., “because even if we fixed that, it would still be the case that there would be a very distressingly low number of individuals from underrepresented groups who are part of what we’re trying to do in science.”

The N.I.H. program will provide research opportunities for undergraduate students, financial support for undergraduate and graduate students, and set up a mentoring program to help students and researchers beginning their careers.

When the program ramps up, it will cost about $50 million a year and support about 600 students.

The N.I.H. formed a group of 16 scientists to study the causes of the problem, and the group presented its recommendations in June. At a meeting this month of his advisory committee, Dr. Collins and other officials discussed how to implement the recommendations.

At the meeting, Dr. Reed Tuckson, an executive vice president and the chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group, who was one of the group’s co-chairman, acknowledged the controversies that would inevitably accompany the effort, especially as the N.I.H., like the rest of the federal government, could soon face sizable cuts in its budget.

“This is a heavy, laden issue which no matter which way you turn, someone is going to be irritated,” he said.

Dr. Tuckson, who is black, urged his colleagues to support the efforts. “A lot of people put themselves on the line,” he said.

The study last year, published in the journal Science, reviewed 83,000 grant applications between 2000 and 2006. For every 100 applications submitted by white scientists, 29 were awarded grants. For every 100 applications from black scientists, only 16 were financed.

After statistical adjustments to ensure a more apples-to-apples comparison, the gap narrowed but persisted.

That raised the uncomfortable possibility that the scientists reviewing the applications were discriminating against black scientists, possibly reflecting an unconscious bias. Members of other races and ethnic groups, including Hispanics, do not appear to run into the same difficulties, the study said.

Only about 500 doctoral degrees in a year in biological sciences go to underrepresented minorities, like blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.

To persuade more students to pursue this as a career, the N.I.H. aims to provide more summer research opportunities for undergraduates.

“That is the single strongest predictor of somebody deciding that that’s the career they want to pursue,” Dr. Collins said of mentored research.”

The program will also provide money to professors so that they can have more time to mentor students or train new mentors.

“They’re talking about a multipronged approach, which I think is a smart approach,” said Dr. Raynard S. Kington, president of Grinnell College in Iowa and a former deputy director of N.I.H. who was a co-author of the Science paper. “If they had just said, ‘We’re going to focus on review,’ I would have been deeply disappointed.”

Donna K. Ginther, an economics professor at the University of Kansas who led the Science study, has taken a closer look at a subset of 2,400 proposals included in the original study. It turns out, she said, that the black applicants published fewer papers and have fewer co-authors than other scientists.

That helps explain the financing gap, but also suggests that the professional networks of black scientists are smaller. “The hypothesis being that professionally, they’re not as integrated,” Dr. Ginther said, “and that’s why I think the mentoring network is such a good idea.”

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Sasol Betting Big on Gas-to-Liquid Plant in U.S.

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.

ORYX GTL

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.

John M. Broder reported from Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar, and Clifford Krauss from Houston.

John M. Broder reported from Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar, and Clifford Krauss from Houston.

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