ULAN BATOR, Mongolia — Three kinds of foreigners, they say, prowl the world’s energy frontiers: missionaries, misfits and mercenaries.

Howard Hodgson, a weather-beaten Australian drilling executive with the mouth of a sailor, is proud to say he is in it for the money.

When he landed here more than a decade ago, Mr. Hodgson found an economic wasteland still reeling from the fall of Mongolia’s Communist overlords in 1990. The few other expatriates on the scene were mostly busy proselytizing, and there was little to do during the brutal winters but develop a taste for fermented mare’s milk.

Yet to Mr. Hodgson, a veteran of the wilds of Papua New Guinea, Myanmar and Pakistan, the young democracy was a welcome change of scenery. “I’d had enough running around in the jungle,” he said recently.