ION Geophysical Corporation announced today that it has entered into an agreement to increase its ownership of ocean bottom seismic (OBS) acquisition company OceanGeo B.V. to 100%. ION acquired 30% of OceanGeo in February 2013 and increased its ownership to 70% in January 2014.
The timing of the announcement coincides with a separate press release issued by OceanGeo, regarding a recently awarded substantial survey offshore West Africa for an international oil company. The significant contract comes on the heels of OceanGeo recently completing a 540sq km survey offshore Trinidad for Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago Ltd (Petrotrin), on time, on budget and with no QHSE incidents.
Brian Hanson, ION's President and CEO, commented, "The OBS segment is the fastest-growing seismic market segment today, commanding an estimated 13% of E&P company marine seismic spend, up from about 6% in 2006. Our increase in ownership of OceanGeo is indicative of our full commitment to the OBS market and is in keeping with our strategy of leveraging our key technologies, such as our Calypso® next generation VSO acquisition system, to deliver solutions to oil & gas companies. With the addition of OceanGeo services, we now offer a fully-integrated OBS solution that includes survey planning and design, data acquisition using Calypso, and data processing, interpretation and reservoir services through our GX Technology group.“