You and I both know it's coming ...

And when it does, millions of us will look back on the past year longingly.Meanwhile, a handful of us will look back triumphantly ...

$5 gas, here we come -- again !
That's right, I said it ... despitea shaky economy and despite the Obama administration's likely crackdown on speculators the Commodity Futures Trading Commission now blames for 2008's historic run-up.

Because let's face it -- over the long haul, demand for oil and gas will drastically outstrip supply. And the majority of that supply is controlled by a handful of obscenely wealthy foreign businessmen who, as old T. Boone Pickens points out, don't like us very much.

Point being, oil and gas prices will eventuallyrecover -- and then soar to new highs. When they do, everyone's going to get pinched at the pump -- yet only a few will get rich.

Will you be one of them?
Frankly, that all depends on what you do right now. I've been loading up on specialty deepwater drillers like Transocean and looking to other lesser-known drillers like Atwood Oceanics (NYSE: ATW) and Diamond Offshore (NYSE: DO). I've even picked up shares of the Energy Select SPDR , which counts oil and gas companies like Anadarko Petroleum (NYSE: APC), Apache (NYSE: APA), and Marathon Oil (NYSE: MRO) among its top holdings.

I've also had my eye on smaller, specialty energy players like seismic data acquisition companies Dawson Geophysical and even tiny TGC Industries. They're both swimming in cash, trading near historically low multiples, and well-positioned to shoot higher when the price of oil and gas finally rises. Of course, there's only one problem.

You don't want to wait forever to cash in, do you?
Neither do I. So I sat down with our in-house dividends expert, James Early, to ask him about the otherway to play energy.

No, I'm not referring to dividend-paying oil-services companies like Halliburton , Schlumberger , or BJ Services (NYSE: BJS). Instead, I'm talking about a group of often-overlooked energy investments that make big money regardless of the price of oil and -- andpay you big bucks to own them.

The only way to play energy now
You may already know that I'm talking about master limited partnerships (MLPs), but in case you don't, here's a quick rundown.

MLPs were born out of two Reagan-era tax reforms instituted to spur the development of U.S. energy infrastructure. Consequently, nearly all MLPs are involved in the transportation, storage, refining, or processing of oil and gas.

Yet MLPs charge by the volumeof oil or gas they transport, refine, etc., so fluctuations in the price of the commodities have only a minimal effect on their earnings. And because they're organized as partnerships, they're not taxed on the entity level -- which, for reasons I'll explain in a moment, provides investors a huge tax advantage.

It also means that by law, they have to pay out the great majority of their earnings to their investors -- hence their ultra-high yields (typically from 6% to 10%).

You can buy MLPs online or through your broker, and they trade on major exchanges right along with regular dividend-paying stocks -- the one exception being that instead of shares, you purchase units, making you a unitholder, rather than a shareholder.

"For investors who want a lot of payout without a ton of risk"
That's how James Early describes these investments in the comprehensive MLP guide he recently put together for members of our Motley Fool Income Investor community. Continued...