He eventually dug deep enough to silence his haters and changed the course of history around the world.

168 years later, I'm at the gas station filling up my tank and something occurs to me.

Why do we still use gasoline? Why is no other fuel source has widely used?

The nozzle latch clicked and my tank was full, but I was full of nothing but questions. Why is gasoline the fuel of our society?

And I think this is a question a lot deeper than it seems.

Let's get something clear up top: gasoline isn't the be all and all.

There're other fuel types commonly used like diesel, biodiesel, natural gas, and Red Bull.

But while the margins are growing, gas is still king.

On any given day, the world uses around 100 million barrels of gasoline. That's over four billion gallons!

Nowadays, we turned crude oil into many different products like gasoline, polyester and polyurethane.

But many years ago, it was mainly processed to make kerosene for oil lamps.

In a time before electric lights, manufacturing the lamp fuel was big business. Everybody had kerosene lamps.

Gasoline was just a byproduct of kerosene production, and was used as a cleaning agent, or just simply thrown away.

After its first patent in 1853, it became the first material to be chemically extracted on a commercial scale.

It isn't exactly easy to get that black stuff out of the earth. It's not like there's just a hose coming out of a rock.

An entire industry had to evolve to develop oil drilling and purification techniques.

Process of extracting oil from the earth we know nowadays, was pioneered by a railroad man hired by a kerosene company a little more than 150 years ago.

Pennsylvania, 1858. A conductor and all-around railway guy named Edwin Drake was hired by the Seneca Oil Company to investigate suspected oil reserve.

The potential oil represented millions of dollars in kerosene if it proved fruitful.

His mission was to extract oil from any reserves he found, but the problem was nothing like that had ever been done before.

He bought a drill and a steam engine to power the drill, and headed out to Oil Creek to start drilling.

They drilled through loose gravel, and at around 16 feet down, the hole started collapsing.

Other workers despaired, but Drake was like, "Keep going! Use some iron pipes and driving down there like they were train!"

Geez, I think this guy is obsessed with trains.

And thus, conductor pipes were born.

Used in 10 feet segments, the pipes prevented the holes from collapsing and allowed workers to drill deeper than ever before.

At 32 feet down, they hit bedrock. After that, drilling slowed down significantly.

The project started seeming more and more futile.

It got so stupid that at one point, people would show up to heckle drake and his crew. He didn't let it get to him.

He didn't let it get to him, and nevertheless he persisted.

And on August 27, 1859, Drake and his crew reached a depth of 69 feet.

He was like, "Nice!" And so they all went home and ate pretzels.

Why is pretzels mentioned?

The next day, the drill operator was the first one to show up on site.

He looked down all 69 feet of the crevasse, and saw that sweet crude oil bubbling up from the hole. Bingo.

Despite how long it took drake to accomplish his drill, his innovative conductor pipe revolutionized oil drilling.

The segmented pipes allow the steam drill to reach levels that were previously unimaginable.

Drake's well produced 25 barrels of oil a day, and by 1872, the whole Oil Creek area was producing 15.9 thousands barrels a day.

Kerosene production was the priority until automobile manufacturers started producing gasoline engines.

Nowadays we use gas because it's still one of the cheapest fuel sources to produce.

A gallon of gas cost less than a gallon of milk in the US.

I use milk as my universal cost standard.

Europeans pay a pretty penny for their gas, with the exception of Western Russia, who pays around 2.73$ a gallon.

The countries that pay the least for gas are the countries that have the most access to it.

It might be cheap, but that doesn't mean that gas is affordable.

In the US, the average daily income is $170, so a gallon of gas is 1.85% of the daily income.

Even though Nigerians pay 1.57$ a gallon, that's 30% of their daily income.

People in India get hit the hardest. They pay an average of 4.77$ a gallon, which is 77% of their daily average income.

The cost of producing a barrel of gasoline around the world is just as diverse,

and it differs because of different factors like the availability of crude oil, taxes, subsidies, ease of transport and production labor.

So gas is cheap and makes the zoom zoom and a poom poom.

But it's hard to deny that's changing our climate.

At what point do we take responsibility and phase gasoline out?

Alternative fuels have been researched and utilized for as long as engines have been around.

Diesel is a viable alternative to gas.

Although it is derived from crude oil, as gas is, it has more potential energy which requires less of it to go a greater distance.

Biodiesel is even better because it doesn't require crude oil to produce.

It's made by chemically reacting lipids, or fats, with alcohol, which means that anything from coffee grounds to human flesh can be used to produce biofuel.

There are a couple of downsides to diesel though.

It pollutes more than gasoline, and because diesel engines require high amounts of pressure to perform, engines are costly to produce.

Ethanol has been praised as a fuel that will free us from our gasoline addiction.

Pure ethanol engines don't exist outside of the racetrack, so ethanol is used as an additive to gasoline.

Cutting gas with ethanol has advantages over pure gasoline, such as being biodegradable, polluting less and having a better energy balance.

Ethanol isn't perfect though.

For one, it corrodes steel, making it harder to ship. And it's not super cost effective.

And land that is used to grow corn or sugarcane for ethanol, could be used to grow food, which some people say is more important than gas.

The biggest problem though is that ethanol is a temporary solution to a much bigger problem.

If we want to keep living in the world we enjoy, we're gonna have to find a way to stop polluting so much.

Alternative fuels are great, but even the best one still pollute.

The only true solution to freeing ourselves from our gasoline addition, is to use 100% renewable energy.

We look at the issues in the car world that affect you every week here on Wheelhouse, so hit that yellow subscribe button right there.

While you're at it, check out this episode of Wheelhouse right here, and check out this sick episode of Up to Speed right around here.

Be nice. See you next time.