Robert Friedland, the man whose company discovered nickel at Voisey's Bay in Newfoundland, made his move for the oil sands on Thursday, signing a $105-million preliminary agreement for undeveloped orphan assets that Talisman Energy Inc. has been trying to sell for two years.

Mr. Friedland runs Ivanhoe Energy Inc., a Calgary-based company that controls nominal oil and natural gas production in the United States and China. Its main goal is to develop new technology to upgrade low-quality oil–such as the bitumen in the oil sands–into valuable synthetic crude, the kind of barrels sold for more than $100.

Ivanhoe plans the first commercial test of its so-called HTL (heavy-to-light) technology at Talisman's Lease 10, located about 15 kilometres northeast of Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, just south of a Suncor Energy Inc. mine.

“We will now proceed full speed ahead,” Mr. Friedland said in a statement.

In 1993, two geologists working for Mr. Friedland's Diamond Fields Resources were hunting for diamonds in Labrador when they discovered a motherlode of nickel at Voisey's Bay. Dubbed a “nickel prince” at the time, the able promoter sold his company to Inco Ltd. for $4.3-billion. The development of Voisey's Bay was a painful odyssey for Inco, which is now owned by Vale of Brazil, formerly CVRD.

Ivanhoe Energy, worth about $650-million on the Toronto Stock Exchange, is paying for the Talisman assets in stages, with $30-million in cash at closing. Talisman retains an option to keep a minority stake.

The estimate amount of bitumen that could be recovered is about 300 million barrels, meaning the purchase price per-barrel in the ground that might be eventually be extracted is 36 cents. The figure is fairly low compared with other oil sands deals, where bitumen in the ground has been valued at $1 or more, indicating the Talisman assets are not top tier, especially given they took two years to sell.

The recovery method would be steam-assisted gravity drainage, where two wells are drilled, with hot steam injected in one to warm the viscous bitumen and the other to bring it to the surface.

The bitumen reservoir on Lease 10 is estimated to be 20 metres thick, which is half the size of other projects in the region.

Beyond Ivanhoe Energy and the oil sands, Mr. Friedland runs Ivanhoe Mines Ltd., a $3.4-billion Toronto Stock Exchange company that is trying to develop the $3-billion Oyu Tolgoi gold and cooper mine in Mongolia with partner Rio Tinto PLC. Mr. Friedland has struggled to win a “approved investment agreement” from the government, stalling construction.

Earlier this year, Canadian Trade Minister David Emerson lobbied Mongolia to speed the process.

Mr. Friedland, a billionaire, has a mixed reputation, dubbed “toxic Bob” by Forbes magazine several years ago. Around the same time, he was named the “2006 Mining Person of the Year” by the Northern Miner, a top industry publication, for signing on Rio Tinto at Oyu Tolgoi.

In Mr. Friedland's early years, he successfully found financial backers to reopen gold mines in Colorado and later in Venezuela. But the Colorado mining operation became entangled in an environmental scandal and the Venezuelan gold play was a bust.

He redeemed himself—and made his name—with the junior mining play called Diamond Fields.

Mr. Friedland personally netted almost a half-billion dollars when Inco paid $4.3-billion for the company.

His fame in the mining world comes from his promotion of long shot mining plays and his knack for attracting investors to remote regions or complex plays.

As of March 31, Ivanhoe Energy had $6.7-million cash. The company said it plans to finance the first $30-million of the Talisman deal “from a combination of strategic investors and/or traditional debt and equity markets.”

The company believes Talisman's Lease 10 could produce about 40,000 barrels a day.