The Tool Crib

Larry Wilson: Old School Pasadenans reuniting in memories

I'm afraid I'm probably using up a server all by myself, overheating some warehouse up in eastern Washington State with all the bits and bytes.

It's the spam, sure, and the PR whatnot that comes to newspaper people by default.

But this week, when I go into the mail system's search function and enter Old School Pasadena, the screen offers up this message: "1-20 of tens of thousands."

I think it's really keying in on "Pasadena." When I alter the search a bit, it says "of thousands."

And all because of a little Facebook memory-lane game set up by old-schoolers John C. Pings and Peter Wilson, with occasional entries by other friends like Peggy Sue Davis and Laurie Barlow.

Goes like this: "You know you are from old school Pasadena when ...," with the answers as small or big as you like.

Most are small memories from the 1960s and early '70s, the childhood and teen years of those playing the game.

Some are as vague as recalling the way we were taught Spanish, the same, perhaps, as the ways others are taught elsewhere: "... you remember and repeated this phrase, 'escuchar y repitir.'"

Some are highly specific, as this one, from Peter: " ... you remember how back in the '80's we had our own awesome music venue. Perkins Palace might still be there if the Fire Marshal didn't shut him down. Thanks, Mark, for your great vision. I knew Mark from when I worked at Emily's Restaurant on Arroyo Parkway. He also lived at the Captain's House on top of Grace Terrace."

Perkins, by the way, is the same place as what was known as the Crown Theatre in the '60s for movies, and as the Raymond Theatre in both its vaudeville days of the '20s and in the '90s attempts to save it as a performance venue. Emily's, by the way, was an early iteration of a fine restaurant in what is now the Parkway Grill.

It goes on like that. It's a great game if you were present at the creation. There's a fine lot of nostalgia for the days when a young person could stumble upon a backyard party and the band playing on the lawn was Van Halen ... or Mammoth, as the guys were once known.

But my favorites are the links with photos.

Canadian Oil Sands and America: Part 2 « Hot Air

Yesterday we covered surface mining extraction of oil sands as practiced by Suncor in Alberta. But as noted, only roughly 1/5 of the deposits are close enough to the surface to reach through conventional methods. Necessity being the mother of invention, the energy industry was forced to develop new technologies to reach the rest of it. Today we’ll look at one way this is being done, as well as a bit of the cultural and economic impact these operations have on the community.

What is SAGD?

I had the opportunity to tour the Surmont facility, operated by ConocoPhillips in partnership with Total , where they are producing oil using a cutting edge engineering procedure. The company has pioneered a process known as steam-assisted gravity drainage (or SAGD.) Because the bitumen is too thick to flow through a pipeline in its native state, a pair of horizontal pipelines are run through the reserve, one above the other. Super-heated steam is pumped into the upper pipe, melting the oil sands and creating a slowly expanding steam chamber. The liquified bitumen flows down into the lower pipe where it is pumped to the surface.

When the oil reaches the plant it is mixed with lighter, less viscous fuel (also extracted locally) to produce a form of synthetic crude suitable for sale and delivery in the pipeline. The mixing is required because, left in its original form, the bitumen solidifies into something with the consistency of a hockey puck. We were shown an example of the congealed bitumen during a presentation at the end of the tour.

Controlling water usage to minimize environmental impact is a key priority in the SAGD process, just as with surface mining. ConocoPhillips’ water reclamation rate is over 90%, with the returning steam being captured, cooled, cleansed of impurities and returned for continuous loops through the cycle.

VIDEO : In this short video , a ConocoPhillips lab technician provides a brief demonstration of how the water used in the system is recovered and purified for reuse.

This method of “in-situ” resource extraction also has the salutary effect of vastly reducing the plant’s footprint on the land. A rather compact processing plant generates the steam, sending it along pipelines to small drilling pads miles away where it is injected into the ground. A matching line brings the liquified fuel back to the plant for processing. Since the drilling is done horizontally after reaching the depth of the oil sand, multiple pairs of pipelines can spread out from a single pad covering a wide area without requiring multiple, individual insertion points. And just like the Suncor operation, any surface area which is disturbed during the construction process is replanted with indigenous trees and ground cover.

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