T&T's de­clin­ing oil pro­duc­tion will re­verse from as ear­ly as the first quar­ter of this year, En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine said in an e-mailed state­ment."Based on a pre­lim­i­nary as­sess­ment of in­for­ma­tion, in­di­ca­tions are that oil/con­den­sate pro­duc­tion in the first quar­ter of 2015 will out­strip oil pro­duc­tion in the first quar­ter of 2014," he said.

"The slide in oil pro­duc­tion that start­ed in 2006 has been halt­ed over the last three years. We ex­pect oil pro­duc­tion in 2015 to be slight­ly high­er than what ob­tained in 2014."The state­ment con­tin­ued: "Pre­lim­i­nary es­ti­mates from the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs in­di­cate that in the fourth quar­ter of 2014 there was a two per cent in­crease in oil/con­den­sate out­put com­pared to the fourth quar­ter of 2013.

This in­crease was re­alised de­spite a shut­down of BHP Bil­li­ton's fa­cil­i­ties for main­te­nance in mid-No­vem­ber in­to ear­ly De­cem­ber."Pre­lim­i­nary es­ti­mates al­so in­di­cate, the min­istry said, that na­tion­al oil pro­duc­tion av­er­aged 81,100 bar­rels of oil per day (bopd) in 2014.