Lo­cal oil pro­duc­er Mo­ra Oil Ven­tures says it has signed a new pur­chase agree­ment with Span­ish en­er­gy gi­ant Rep­sol that will pave the way for the re­sump­tion of pro­duc­tion from the Mo­ra A plat­form.

In a state­ment dat­ed Au­gust 30 but pub­lished on the T&T Stock Ex­change (TTSE) web­site yes­ter­day, Mo­ra Ven chair­man George Nicholas said the oil com­pa­ny had been en­gaged in ne­go­ti­a­tions with Rep­sol since De­cem­ber 2015, when pro­duc­tion on the plat­form was stopped, "more than once be­liev­ing that a restart in pro­duc­tion was fore­see­able–on­ly to have new ob­sta­cles arise."

Ac­cord­ing to Nicholas: "We are present­ly in­stalling the in­fra­struc­ture which would en­able our pro­duc­tion to be me­tered ac­cord­ing to API stan­dards plac­ing new me­ters on the Rep­sol plat­form where our pipeline con­nects," ac­cord­ing to the state­ment by Nicholas.

It said that with­in a month the com­pa­ny in­tends to restart pro­duc­tion and that "the cost struc­ture of the Mo­ra Ven Group is in the process of be­ing fur­ther flat­tened to re­main prof­itable at the new price par­a­digm."

Mo­ra Oil Ven­tures is a sub­sidiary of Mo­ra Ven Hold­ings, which is list­ed on the TTSE.

A check on the TTSE web­site yes­ter­day in­di­cat­ed that Mo­ra Ven Hold­ings lat­est fi­nan­cial re­sults were pub­lished on Ju­ly 3 and per­tain to the nine-month pe­ri­od end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 2015.

In those unau­dit­ed re­sults, Mo­ra Ven re­port­ed a 20 per cent de­crease in rev­enue for the first nine months of 2015 as a re­sult of a 70 per cent de­cline in the price of crude.

Mo­ra Ven said that it was seek­ing a part­ner to drill a well from the plat­form, as ear­li­er seis­mic tests in­di­cat­ed a large find with­in reach of the plat­form.

"The snub­bing unit we pur­chased last year was pur­chased for the drilling to con­nect these prospects. We have four slots avail­able on the Plat­form to en­gage this prospect," Mo­ra Ven stat­ed.

The com­pa­ny al­so re­port­ed on its so­lar en­er­gy sub­sidiary, So­laris, which it said "has been steady, though the low­er price of en­er­gy, which start­ed in late 2014, has im­pact­ed the eco­nom­ic ra­tio­nal for chang­ing from non-re­new­able to re­new­able sources."

The re­duc­tion in the oil price "has se­vere­ly im­pact­ed the over­all busi­ness in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the re­gion," but a 20 per cent drop in cost of in­puts, and an in­crease in elec­tric­i­ty util­i­ty prices, had re­sult­ed in much more busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties to the end of the year.