It's funny where money is made sometimes.
I have a friend who decided a decade ago to buy a bankrupt motel in the middle of the swamp in northern Alberta. Most of the passers-by here were forestry workers, dropouts looking for a place to disappear, or migratory birds.
At the time, it seemed crazy.
I saw the same friend a few years after the purchase. The hotel, he told me, was booked solid for the next five years -- upward of 300 rooms at $250 per night.
The modest investment paid him millions over the course of the next several months.
This incredible turnaround was spurred by some big changes in the area that were driven by natural resources development.
My friend bought the hotel just as the oil industry in that part of the world was on the cusp of commercializing vast deposits of unconventional petroleum lying just below the swamps. Those billion-barrel fields would quickly become such a big story in the petroleum business that the formerly unknown town became a household name on the tongues of politicians, industrialists and investors globally.
That place was Fort McMurray -- ground zero for the development of the Canadian oil sands.
The accelerating development of the oil sands over the past decade created a nearly unparalleled cascade of capital investment into this remote wilderness, creating fortunes many times over for those involved early.
It was similar for the investors in companies owning oil sands leases. As these developments went from science projects to mega-producers, stocks such as Canadian Oil Sands (COSWF) soared by over 1,000%.
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Being an early buyer in this sector, you could have bought nearly any company with "oil sands" in its marketing material and made triple-digit returns. It was one of the most remarkable investable events of the past half-century.
I'm telling you this because of a site visit I took last month to an equally out-of-the-way place -- a place where this mega-investment pattern is starting to happen again.
That trip confirmed my suspicions that massive, natural gas-driven investments here are going to blow the local economy through the roof.
Here, I saw how super-major resource companies have already started placing investments that are pegged in the tens of billions over the coming decade. It reminds me of those early days in the oil sands -- a time when no one really believed the grandiose investment plans being plotted in corporate budgets.
More importantly, it reminds me of a time when investors who ended up raking in triple-digit returns from those resource discoveries were still just getting involved.