Exploration Opportunities Archives

Exploration Opportunities

The Keta Basin: Ghana’s deepwater frontier edges back into focus

The Keta Basin – a basin with familiar geological DNA The East Keta acreage lies in the central portion of the Accra-Keta-Benin basin, formed during the Middle Cretaceous opening of the South Atlantic. Geologically, the basin shares some similarities with…

Dave McGurk, Heritage Oil Exploration & Production, Ghana

September 1, 2026

Poised for passion: The race for riches in Equatorial Guinea’s deepwater

Smart licensing in Equatorial Guinea New awards necessitate the availability of a new regionally consistent depth-imaged seismic framework Figure 1: New license awards: ENI (purple), Galp (green), Chevron (orange) and ConocoPhilips (red). In 2025, Searcher reprocessed approximately 10,500 km of…

Neil Hodgson, Karyna Rodriguez and Lauren Found, Searcher

August 25, 2026

Exclusive access to Venezuela’s next offshore play

Venezuela Offshore Multi-Phase Exploration Program, via exclusive multi-client agreement with the Ministry of Hydrocarbons (MINHID). Venezuela offshore: A basin re-entering the global stage Proven discoveries, established infrastructure and newly reprocessed seismic data are providing a clearer understanding of Plataforma Deltana,…

Mike Powney, Jeniffer Masi and George Baba, Geoex MCG; Julian Sherriff and Stephen Doyle, Dug Technology

August 18, 2026

Halo oils, tight-rock saturation, and production allocation: What the North American playbook can and can’t tell the next set of unconventional basins

Halo oils and the limits of the source-rock map The textbook example is the Permian Basin. The Woodford (Late Devonian) and the Barnett (Mississippian) are two of many principal sources, but the oils they generated do not always stay near…

Graham Spence, GeoMark Research

June 24, 2026

A Cenomanian- Turonian source rock adventure in the Pelotas Basin

Searcher and Shearwater’s 16,500 km2 3D in the Pelotas Basin, southern Brazil. Hunting for Cenomanian-Turonian source rocks in the South Atlantic Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, key risk elements to any play (source, reservoir and trap) need to be…

Neil Hodgson, Karyna Rodriguez and Lauren Found, Searcher

June 9, 2026

AI-driven integration for deeper subsurface insights

The state of geoscience today: Challenges & opportunities The rise of ai in subsurface workflows Subsurface characterization has long relied on expert interpretation of subsurface rock samples, well logs, and seismic data. As datasets have become larger, and domain experts…

Earth Science Analytics

June 5, 2026

From image to insight: Why seismic data quality matters for CO₂ storage

Left: Overview map of the NVG reprocessed seismic dataset; Right: Coloured interpretation of the seismic line. Repurposing seismic data for carbon storage activities Carbon storage licensing on the Norwegian Continental Shelf has gained momentum, highlighting its role in the energy…

Irina Pene and Idar Kjørlaug, Viridien

June 3, 2026

Salt of the Earth: Imaging the Gulf’s hidden structures

Gulf of America: Integrating technologies to see beyond the salt The Gulf of America (GOA) remains a central pillar of US energy infrastructure, and its future potential is increasingly tied to the integration of new seismic technologies that can address…

Clay Westbrook and Andrey Bogachev, TGS

May 5, 2026

Morocco’s oceanic crust – A new exploration paradigm

Jurassic source rocks on oceanic crust – Establishing the new ‘hot’ topic offshore Morocco Morocco providing an “in-vogue” frontier Unequivocally, source rocks can generate significant quantities of hydrocarbons atop oceanic crust and therefore conventional thinking of where to explore for…

Mike Powney, Geoex MCG

April 28, 2026

“Seeking the Sweet Spot in offshore Ecuador’s Sweet Shop”

Searcher use of modern processing algorithms to unleash the hidden sweetness in Ecuador’s legacy offshore seismic Setting the scene Figure 1: Offshore Ecuador Main Tectonic Elements. The destructive margin setting for Ecuador’s northern offshore margin has its own complexity in…

Neil Hodgson, Karyna Rodriguez and Lauren Found, Searcher

April 22, 2026

Most subsurface teams aren’t making the most of their data

Figure 2: Using EarthNET and its Data Lake facilitates harmonization, indexing, and contextualization of the data, making it analytics-ready. Energy companies have invested heavily in data over the past several decades. Seismic surveys, wells, petrophysical data, cores, cuttings, lab data,…

Earth Science Analytics

March 24, 2026

Inside every Basin you know is another Basin you haven’t met

Suriname’s north west sub-basin: An extension to the Golden Lane “Trendology” is often derided as an exploration strategy until it is apparent that a trap style in a regionally working play system is in fact repeating, and then everyone jumps…

Neil Hodgson, Karyna Rodriguez and Lauren Found, Searcher; Genevieve Hirchfeld, Dheeraj Biharie, Mitch Jie A Looi, Vanisha Chedi, Sharista Kisoensingh and Nohar Poeketi, Staatsolie

March 17, 2026

The global energy sector from a subsurface perspective