• Camber Energy (CEI) says it’s a carbon capture play
• It’s a failing oil driller, backed by tweets and a short squeeze
• Please don’t buy it unless you like to lose money

Camber Energy (NYSEAMERICAN:CEI) stock is not and likely never will be an investment.

It’s a dream, backed by stock, that would take billions to make real. As I wrote in November the idea is simple enough. Capture carbon dioxide coming off natural gas wells, so it doesn’t go into the air, and re-sell it.

But oilmen don’t care about the environment. They never did. There’s not a big enough market in carbon dioxide to make Camber’s technology worthwhile.

This seemed clear to me in November. It’s even clearer now. Camber stock has lost almost 45% of its value since I wrote my last article on it. It’s currently sitting at around 83 cents/share, a true penny stock.

Pump, Dump, Repeat

The first time I was kicked out of a corporate meeting, in late 1978, I was within blocks of Camber’s headquarters near an Audi dealership on the Katy Freeway. I had just started working with the Houston Business Journal, and all I needed were the meeting results. It was a public shareholders’ meeting, but there were just three men in the room. They weren’t happy to see me. They told me to leave. Being 23, I did.

It was that company’s last public meeting. Not that I had anything to do with its failure. The company just ran out of cash.

Cash is what Camber is all about. Your cash. There was $1.1 million of it on the books at the end of September. That’s the last filing the SEC has on the company. A filing for the half-year ending in March is due June 1. The September cash balance was, however, nearly double the balance from six months earlier.

Where did the cash come from? It came from people like you, lured by the vlog of CEO James Doris, a Canadian lawyer. It also came from followers of Zack Morris with 572,000 followers whose pinned tweet reads “I Love Pumping” and includes a video touting Camber stock.

Just Another Driller

Camber’s income comes from Viking Energy Group, a small oil-and-gas driller it bought in early 2021. 

Before the run-up in oil prices Viking was a classic “dead man drilling.” Its liabilities were greater than its assets, and as the report says there was substantial doubt it would survive.

That’s probably where the carbon capture thing started, a Hail Mary aimed at using new money to get out of trouble. If managers cashed in last September, or even in early March, when the stock price spiked to $3.80, then $1.28 per share, they did OK. The first was the product of a classic Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD) short squeeze, wrote our Chris Markoch. The second was based on rising oil prices, wrote our William White.

The Bottom Line on CEI Stock

There are lots of ways to make an honest dollar in today’s oil business.

Camber Energy isn’t one of them.

Unfortunately, a rising tide lifts all boats. This was one of them. But its wells are depleting, it needs cash to boost production and the cavalry isn’t coming.

The fact that this kind of story is still appearing on my radar, nearly 44 years after I first became a reporter, is a tribute to man’s greed and cupidity. As Stanley Weiser wrote for the movie Wall Street, “a fool and his money are lucky to get together in the first place.”

My aim at InvestorPlace is to find good long-term investments for your retirement money. If anyone touts something like CEI to you, walk away and don’t look back.

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Read More: Penny Stocks — How to Profit Without Getting Scammed

On the date of publication, Dana Blankenhorn did not hold (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.