Hi Kids. Let's get right to it. You'll see in a second why there's no time to delay starting on this project. The price of gas is coming up faster than a spoonful of ipecac syrup. Your folks are blowing a fortune on those trips to the mall and the mini golf. So what can you do to help out mom and dad? Should you get a summer job?... or a bicycle? Heck no. What they need is gasoline, and today we'll teach you how to make your own, from scratch.

Now some a' you think I'm talking about raiding the local diner for that black gold in the Frialator, or perhaps brewing up some hippie biodiesel from hemp or soy, but you're wrong. We're talking about the real deal, distilled from petroleum crude, just like they make it in Texas and Iraq. Following the six simple directions below, we'll show you how to convert dead plant and animal matter -- ordinary compost -- into super unleaded.

1. With ordinary dynamite and excavating equipment, hollow out a bowl-shaped depression in a deposit of sandstone. The size of your oil field can vary, but we recommend starting with an area no bigger than 10,000 acres.

2. Fill this bowl-shaped area about half way with any sort of plant or animal matter mixed with mud or clay slurry the texture of wet concrete. Figure on about 70,000 metric tons of biomass per acre. I use a plankton-kudzu-sphagnum blend, but feel free to experiment here.

3. Now cover over your organic matter and slurry with the sandstone you quarried in step one. This top layer will become your capstone through which you or your descendants will one day drill.

4. Apply tremendous pressure and heat to your oil farm for a long, long time. This sounds hard at first, but all you really need to worry about is the tremendous pressure. (Pressure generates heat. So there you go- two birds, one stone.)

5. While you're waiting on your organic matter to become crude oil, you can begin construction on your oil derricks, and...

6. Build your first refinery for turning that crude into sweet, sweet 93 octane for mom's Suburban.

I know. You're thinking, "What the heck is that Butch talking about? Children making gasoline? That's absurd." I'll tell you why it isn't at all. Making an oil farm takes a long time, agreed. An old timer shouldn't even get his hopes up that he'll yield any usable fuel before he kicks. But kids have so many more years ahead of them. And cost? Well, yeah, some of this could set you back a bit. But think what the price of gas'll be in a hundred, or a thousand, or 5 million years. It's an investment, no different than buying Beanie Babies, or those coins from the Franklin Mint. Petrochemicals are a treasure you can hand down generation to generation. And just think, all the while you're waiting, that oil is bubbling, dripping and perking around in that sandstone like a good pot of cowboy coffee. Have a good one. Enjoy the oil farm. See you next time on Xtreme Engineering when we'll cover some of the problems our readers encountered building those atomic submarines. -bcp