Searcher Seismic is pleased to announce the Kehu 2D seismic survey and has applied for a petroleum prospecting permit in New Zealand waters for the Phase 1 of acquisition.

Phase 1 of the survey will focus on the South-Eastern part of the country with survey extents up to 500 km offshore. This area includes the highly prospective Great Southern, Canterbury, Pegasus and East Coast Basins and acquisition is scheduled to commence in Q4, 2014.

Alan Hopping, General Manager for Searcher Seismic, said this is the start of what Searcher plans to be a multi-phase programme providing the first opportunity to apply a consistent, modern seismic dataset to understanding the nature and extent of the various offshore basins and their relationships to each other in the complex tectonic environment that characterises New Zealand.

A modern survey design solution implementing a deep tow solid streamer and modern broadband processing workflow will deliver a Broadband Seismic dataset, providing significant improvement in data quality than what is currently in the public domain.

The new data will provide companies with a unique opportunity to develop a cutting edge understanding of the petroleum potential of offshore New Zealand basins and devise appropriate exploration strategies.

Searcher’s collaboration with GNS Science has been instrumental to the design of line locations for the survey as well as being able to deliver an integrated interpretation with representative survey data and other seismic, well and potential field data.