The last gallon of gasoline was consumed on May 22 of a year best left to the imagination. But its story started long before, beneath the crystalline light of a younger Sun, and the manner of its consumption would dictate the fate of the planet for millions of years to come.
The beginning came in a forest where plants, using photosynthetic pathways that would persist unchanged for much longer than the gasoline, fought to capture that young Sun's energy. Those that succeeded grew quickly, but that made them weak and many toppled in hurricanes wandering inland from an unnamed tropical sea.
Beneath the plants, animals sought shelter from the storms, but all too frequently that was elusive. Floods washed bodies and debris into marshes where there wasn't enough oxygen for them to decompose before the next storm brought more mud and more debris, until everything was buried so deeply it began to bake under the slow heat leaking from the Earth's interior.
Patiently, the Earth cooked this rich organic stew. It blended the remains of logs and ferns with those of dinosaur bones and blood until the resulting goo began to percolate upward, only to be trapped beneath a dome of impenetrable rock. There it stayed, in a place that would one day be part of the Macedonian Empire--and then of Rome, Persia, Iran, and more, as the species that inherited the globe from the dinosaurs divided it with imaginary lines, fought over them, drew more lines, and fought again.
Then, geologists spotted the dome in a survey of the world's last oil supplies. It wasn't large, but the surveyors marked their maps and bided their time. Later, other people drilled into it and liberated the precious ooze that carried the energy of that ancient sun.
By this time, oil was prodigiously expensive. Ninety percent of the reserve was purchased by a petrochemical company that used it to make specialty chemicals for which it was still the best feedstock. The rest went to a real estate magnate who had it refined into gasoline for his antique car collection, happy to have a private supply, because the old engines did not run well on biofuel.
Even a small oil deposit makes a lot of gasoline. But "a lot" isn't the same as "more than you'll ever need." Eventually the tycoon's stockpile ran low. He hoarded it, using less and less until, in his dotage, he used almost none. Then he added the remainder to his granddaughter's trust fund and discovered that, ultimately, even trillionaires must die.
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