Or something thermal sensor based, there's rumored to be systems that submarines can use passively to follow and track other submarines by the waste heat put into the water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
Managing the interference is probably the main issue.
Actually, I see now the Wikipedia entry lists prospecting among the uses, so I guess it's quite possibly not only practical but even practiced.
The main problem in using it, as I understand it, is rather that picking up everything the sensor could detect would usually result in an unmanageable deluge of unwanted information, and it's a normal operation context to filter the signal for distance so as to not pick up too much interference from equipment, staff, etc. But personally I don't see any reason it would be impossible to arrange it to band-pass instead of low-pass in that filtering.
Not to mention that sonar is highly disruptive to many forms of sea life as it's incredibly loud.