Monday, June 22, 2009

Creationist oil drilling

More on Zion Oil and Gas, a company tied to Hal Lindsey that picks sites to drill for oil based on misinterpretations of the Bible--and they're looking in Israel. The Bronte Capital blog writes about the company as a counterexample to the claim that all oil exploration work uses mainstream old-earth geology, so now, to be accurate, you need to say that this is true of all successful oil exploration work. (I believe Uri Geller allegedly helped in some oil or mineral exploration in the past, so the former claim had already been falsified, though I think the latter still holds.)

Bronte Capital notes that since Zion can claim that it is making its decisions based on constitutionally protected religious belief, that may be a defense against accusations of stock fraud.

Zion's stock trades on the American Exchange under stock symbol ZN. It has a market capitalization of $85.17 million, and closed last week at $8.00/share, near the bottom of its 52-week range ($5.07-$17.68). The company formed in 2000 and has offices in Texas and Israel.

The company's stock is, unfortunately, not available for shorting.

Here's a Zion promotional video:





(Previously.)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I guess if you are going to toss out geology and the other related sciences this method of finding oil is probably just as good as any other.

You'd think solar would be a better bet there for a primary energy source in Israel. My brain is slow but I think they've had laws about residential hot water for a long time.

Trott said...

Are you sure this company is creationist and not merely Biblical? At about 6:20 or so in the first video, a guy from the company talks about "the Permian section of the Paleozoic Age." That doesn't sound like creationist talk to me. I guess they could be old earthers. Or maybe young earthers using the terminology just to identify different strata that they attribute to the flood of Noah.

Lippard said...

Trott: Young-earth creationist geologist Andrew Snelling also makes use of the standard names in the geological column in his scientific publications, but your point is good--I don't know whether Hal Lindsey or Zion are actually young-earth creationists or old-earth creationists. I would be willing to bet, however, that they are creationists.