With oil now at the insane price of nearly $140 a barrel, a lot of folks want to jump on the bandwagon to get rich. They think playing oil is the way to go.

They're wrong. I know that sounds crazy when the Big 3 oil companies—ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX) and BP (BP)—have a combined market value the size of Estonia's entire economy! But I'm here to tell you that you're not going to get rich that way—at least not in oil stocks.

Why?

They don't control the price of oil any more than you or I do. OPEC does. Speculators do. Supply and demand factor in. Even terrorists have an impact. Not the oil companies. Does that mean there's no way to profit from the spike in oil prices?

Absolutely not.

In GameChangers, I'm recommending three small entrepreneurial companies that are changing the energy game. All three offer real, practical solutions to our energy dilemma far more effective than any politician has devised and, frankly, better than anything being pursued in Big Oil's board rooms.

Here's how these three companies are putting us on the right energy track:

New Supplies and New Methods

The truth is, massive new supplies of oil and gas are ready to be tapped by new methods. In particular, deep sea drilling is now feasible with never-before created alloys that can pierce the Earth's mantle.

Steel becomes tissue paper below 6,000 feet of sea water, but new carbon materials are 10 times stronger, yet much lighter.

The GameChanger here is new materials we can now build, atom by atom, to make uncrushable drill bits for deep-sea oil rigs.  This equipment is already in use off the Indian coast, deep in the South China Seas and beneath the Arctic.

First reports are so good, I frankly don't believe them, and you should ignore them. But if they were to find just one...