Austrian oil company OMV knows exploration is a risky game but one risk it hadn't figured on was sharks - not metaphorical ones.

One of the marine predators snapped off a cable towing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of seismic gear during a just completed search of the Great South Basin, south of New Zealand.

OMV, owned 31 per cent by the Austrian government and the country's largest industrial company, with partners PTTEP Offshore Investment of Thailand (36 per cent) and Mitsui Exploration and Production Australia Pty of Japan (28 per cent) won a New Zealand Government auction to search part of the 500,000sq km petroleum basin.

The OMV consortium will spend tens of millions of dollars exploring the wild, underexplored area over the next two years. Luckily for OMV, the expensive cable bitten off by the shark was retrieved by a following vessel and the company successfully completed a 14,000km survey of the basin.

Only eight wells have been drilled in the basin - six of them in the 1970s by Hunt International Petroleum, working with Phillips Petroleum, with a couple drilled in the early 1980s by Placid Oil.

Phillips stirred up a flurry of interest with its claims at the time that the Great South Basin potentially held 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but the gas and oil shows from half a dozen exploration wells failed to show enough commercial promise for gas, and only traces of oil.

OMV will not even start analysing the seismic survey results until later this year and it would be 2010 at the earliest before any exploration could be attempted.

To even bring a suitable drilling rig would cost more than $30 million.

OMV managing director Steve Hounsell said the distance between wells was huge but OMV and its partners would not have invested in the region if they didn't think it worthwhile.

"The price of oil certainly helps."

When OMV increased its interest in this part of the world, the price of oil was around US$20 a barrel, one sixth of today's price.

But he said the cost of drilling had gone up substantially as demand for exploration equipment exploded.

A drilling rig could cost around $600,000 a day - up 50 per cent on five years ago.

OMV this week will celebrate the arrival of its floating, production, storage and off-take (FPSO) vessel, Raroa, which with a 150m high wellhead platform that arrived from Malaysia earlier in the month, will form the bulk of its half billion dollar development of the Maari field 80km off south Taranaki.

The 10,000-tonne wellhead platform - half the height of Auckland's Sky Tower - was brought on board the world's largest heavy transport vessel, the Blue Marlin.