Hey, guys! I'm starting to work on my first setting (D&D 3.5, in case it matters) based on an idea I had based on someone else's reaction to some flavor text; namely, them saying that it's ridiculous that dragons can sustain themselves on rocks, gems, so on so forth and that a method for breaking down and smelting ores in a way that produced more energy than it consumed would revolutionize the energy industry.

I'm basically building the rest of my setting around this concept. My idea is that a few hundred years ago, some wizards managed to discern this property of dragon stomachs and started a business in their kingdom of using harvested dragon stomachs to cheaply break impure elements into their individual components and gather the excess energy produced to use as a substitute for the XP costs for like, magic item crafting and stuff.

Present day, most of the dragon population has been enslaved and are being bred and driven like cattle, with spells used on them right when they're born to cripple their minds permanently and generally keep them from being too good at escaping.

That's pretty much everything I've got, though. It's just an idea; a monumental idea, one that I think I can start building a setting around, but still lonely and incomplete.

Since I like to start with civilizations and build the rest of the world around what could make those civilizations cool and unique rather than starting with land and designing the civilization based on the geography (that's way too scientific for me anyway) I thought I'd start with how this might be utilized and effect the governments and politics of the world.

So, yeah. I'm not even really sure where to start, but I wanted to get you guys' opinions on it. How might this effect the political landscape of the world? How might laws and even entire government systems be morphed by the introduction of this method of cheap separation of minerals and mass efficient production of energy?

I've got preliminary thoughts; the first guys to do this probably got a head-start and by now would be the number one big players of the world. Dragon stomachs and dragons would probably become crazy-expensive trade pieces, and I imagine this world would have a much more logical reason for the existence of Magic Marts.

But I don't really have a lot. I'm new to this and I'm sure I'm missing things. How might the political and government-related side of things be effected by this mass production of energy, in the opinions of all you more experienced world-builders?