Is it surprising to anyone else but me that the price of gasoline is going down?

I know, I know. The price is higher in Warsaw than anywhere else. All you have to do is read the letters to the editor to figure that out.

But, seriously, the price of gasoline is going down.

I guess it's a supply and demand thing. And one thing is certain. Gasoline is in higher demand these days than ever before.

More people, more cars, more driving. And the types of cars we drive are using more gas, too.

Remember the good old days, back in the '70s and '80s? Ford was manufacturing models with a II after them - Mustang II, Bronco II.

The II meant that the model was a scaled down shell of its former version.

The scaled down versions had smaller engines and got better gas mileage.

Foreign manufacturers were coming out with tiny cars that looked like motorized roller skates. Some of them got more than 40 miles per gallon.

Why?

Because gas was expensive. Well, at least we thought it was expensive. If you came from Europe it was cheap. Europeans were paying $3 a gallon for the stuff.

I realize I'm showing my age here, but when I was in high school gas was 29 cents a gallon. For two bucks you could cruise all night - and buy a pack of Camels, too. (Sorry about the Camels, mom.)

Back then, nobody even thought about gas mileage.

Seems like that's the way it is today. Next time you drive by a car lot, look at how many sport utility vehicles are on display. It's amazing.

(Before we go any further I feel compelled to note that I drive a sport utility - aÊ1985 Bronco II.)

I see these housewives at the grocery store driving these massive, four-wheel-drives. Some of them are enormous. (The vehicles, I mean.)

One company even has ads that tout their vehicle as BIGGER than their competitors'. "The largest sport utility on the planet," the ad proclaims.

I suppose drivers of these vehicles are buying a certain sense of security. It's akin to driving a tank.

If you're in an accident, chances are you won't get banged up too badly. Frankly, you could probably just drive over the hapless motorist in the midsize sedan and never even know it.

And four-wheel-drive is nice. My old Bronco is a 4X4. I like to justify having a 4X4 by saying that I live way out by a lake and the roads are all curvy and dangerous in the winter.

Fact is, if I lock in the hubs twice a year, I'm lucky. (The new giant sport utility vehicles are full-time 4X4. You don't have to lock in the hubs in those.)

So why are all these people shelling out $30,000 or $40,000 to buy a massive 4X4 that trundles along at 10 or 12 miles per gallon when they really don't need it? (I especially like the ones with those environment license tags.)

It must be a status thing. The bigger the sport ute, the bigger the bank account, or something.

And the one thing that's made it all possible is the availability of relatively inexpensive gasoline.

But according to a series of articles in the March edition of Scientific American, the phrase "inexpensive gasoline" may soon become an oxymoron.

The series is called "The End of Cheap Oil." The major premise of the series is that "global production of conventional oil will begin to decline sooner than most people think - probably within 10 years."

It takes a long time for the earth to generate crude oil. And right now, the earth's conventional crude oil is almost half gone, the article says.

Estimating the amount of crude oil in the earth is not an exact science, but with the detection equipment available today, geologists can get pretty close.

The article notes that oil "reserves (the amount of oil as likely as not to come of known fields) and future discoveries together will provide little more than what has already been burned."

The article notes that predicting when oil production will begin to decline is relatively easy if you have a good estimate of how much oil there is left to produce.

Figuring out how much oil is left is a vastly complex task, but the article goes into great detail explaining how the authors did it.

The authors of the article, Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere, have each worked in the oil industry for more than 40 years.

They "combined several techniques to conclude that about 1,000 billion barrels of conventional oil remain to be produced."

Geologists know how much oil we're using every year.

And geologists know that the flow of oil from any individual well or region starts to fall when about half of the crude is gone. It's your basic bell curve.

In fact, using this model in 1956, a geologist for Shell Oil was able to correctly predict that oil production in the lower 48 states of the United States would peak in 1969.

When you consider Campbell and Laherrere's estimate of the remaining oil to be produced, and figure in a current increase in demand of about 2 percent a year, it looks as if production will begin to decline somewhere around 2010. Most of the reserves will be gone by 2050 or 2060.

That's not that far away. The article notes that "the transition to post-oil economy need not be traumatic." It says that we need to come up with methods of producing liquid fuels from natural gas. We need safer nuclear power, cheaper renewable energy and oil conservation programs. All these things could "help postpone the inevitable decline of conventional oil. ... The world is not running out of oil - at least not yet. What society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend," the article concludes.

It's fascinating reading.

Whether these geologists are accurate forecasters or gloom-and-doomers remains to be seen, but what they say doesn't seem all that far-fetched to me.

If they are right, a couple things are certain.

1. The cost of gas will skyrocket.

2. You'll be able to get a great deal on that gigantic sport ute you've always wanted. [[In-content Ad]]