A veteran of Canada's ailing oilpatch is hoping a new product drawn from deep under Prairie grain fields will provide a natural resource boom for Western Canada.
Marlon McDougall, 59, says he wasn't interested when first approached last year to join a junior exploration company.
"You do things right," he said. "You have an idea, you capture land, you shoot seismic, you go out and drill exploration wells, you make discoveries and it just rolls on from there."Demand for the gas once used mainly for military, weather and party balloons has been steadily rising, creating shortages and spiking prices in recent years.
"It's still a lot of rank exploration right now," she said, adding no one knows how much helium -- produced by the decay of radioactive uranium and thorium -- the province contains. Western Canada has an advantage over other new sources of helium in that its best reserves are found in pools made up of 95 per cent nitrogen, said Scott Mundle, an assistant professor and researcher at the University of Windsor in Ontario who has been studying samples from helium explorers.
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