by Marney Blom
Can 3000 year-old passages of the Bible contain a modern-day treasure map for the discovery of oil in Israel? Zion Oil and Gas are betting on it.
With more than $70 million dollars invested to date, the American corporation based in Dallas, Texas, traces its origins back to the convictions of its founder, John Brown an evangelical Christian. In 1985, the American businessman began his pursuit of oil in Israel based on passages of Scripture.
“There seemed to be a confluence of biblical teaching and modern science,” says Richard Rinberg, director and CEO of Zion Oil and Gas. Geologists, he says, used purely scientific techniques to identify the same spot for drilling to which Brown was led through biblical research.
Today the company holds three petroleum exploration licenses covering almost a quarter of a million acres from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean Sea – an area encompassing Mount Meggido and the Jezreel Valley.
According to Bill Ottaviani, president and chief operating officer, “The study that was released by the US Geological Survey [indicates] the significant potential where all of Zion’s rights are represented. All around Israel are oil and gas producing countries. So when you couple the two factors together, you are led very obviously to the conclusion that yes, there is going to be more oil and gas production here in Israel.”
However, recovering oil in Israel is fraught with challenges. “The reason onshore Israel there haven’t been the discoveries that we believe are going to come, is because you have to drill deep,” says Rinberg. Six years of drilling have yielded only modest amounts of the hydrocarbon – quantities too small to make production economically viable. “If you go back, ten, 15, 20 years, there wasn’t the technology to get as deep as we are going.” The company now has a thousand tons of equipment on the site to
dig more than 19,000 feet deep, more than three and a half miles underground. This depth qualifies Zion’s Ma’anit-Joseph #3 site, as the deepest oil dig in Israel to date.
Even though the oil lies deep, it is possible that Israel’s on-shore oil reserves mirror in scope the vastness of its off-shore natural gas potential. If that is the case, the tiny Zionist state could in fact, emerge as oil-rich as its neighbors – a possibility Israel’s Infrastructure Ministry is not overlooking. It contends that Israel’s sub-surface oil shale is comparable to that of Saudi Arabia.
But even more arresting than the potential fortune underground, are the Scriptures foretelling what will happen on the ground within a 15-mile radius of Zion’s current oil rig. That is the area where, according to Scripture, the world’s armies will gather to fight the great end-time battle of Armageddon. But share-holders don’t appear to be concerned. Zion Oil and Gas stocks continue to climb. Bolstered by the discovery of Leviathan, one of this decade’s largest natural gas field finds, off-shore in Israeli waters, investors believe it’s just a matter of time before on-shore “blessings of the deep” are within reach.
Marney Blom is news director for Acts News Network.
Copyright © 2011 Acts News Network.