Recently, the GOOD website printed up GOOD Sheet #4, a nice graph of where the money given to gas stations goes. (GOOD defies description, but it's pretty good. Check it out.) Hard-copies of the sheet are available at Starbucks, but interested viewers can find an online copy here.

It's worth checking out: in a clear, easy-to-read manner, GOOD shows how the profit on gas is distributed and outlines the major factors that drive price. What it doesn't cover, however, is the ways that oil-producing companies actually use this money. Unfortunately, this is also the most important aspect of the oil market.

Oil is, perhaps, the most effective tool for wealth consolidation in the history of the world. Whether through technological innovation, conflict, or the luck of the draw, certain areas and people have ended up with large amounts of crude petroleum at their disposal.

I just learned about Frank Pringle. Get to know his name. He might be our savior when it comes to oil.

Let's get the elephant out of the room: for all of you wondering, he is not the inventor of Pringles. However, he can probably take a Pringles can and extract oil from it.

Pringle, 64, is the CEO of Global Resource Corp. (GRBC), in West Berlin, New Jersey, and he has developed a patent-pending emissions-free environmentally-friendly technology that uses microwaves to pull out fuel from shale rock, tires, plastic bottles, toxic sludge from river bottoms and other pieces of junk. Actually, I'm not sure if he can get oil from a Pringles can, but he has microwaved lawn cuttings into a substance that could be refined into alcohol fuel. It sounds like he can make oil out of about anything.

A public relations colleague of mine represents him. Late last year, he was covered in Time Magazine (which named his invention as one of the best of the year) and Popular Science, which also said he had one of the best inventions of the year. Why his technology hasn't caught on yet, assuming it works as well as it's been reported, is beyond me. But maybe our $4 per gallon of gas will make Pringle more in demand.