John Swinney appears to have softened his position on drilling in the North Sea after conceding the impact of the Iran War on the UK’s energy security.
The First Minister told a pre-election hustings event that the geopolitical situation raised “grave issues” for Britain and helped make the case for exploiting the Jackdaw gas and Rosebank oil and gasfields.
Both are currently under review after activists won a court ruling that a previous permission had failed to pass environmental tests.
Mr Swinney told the Holyrood Sources podcast that he still favoured climate compatibility assessments before drilling was allowed to go-ahead.
“That assessment on climate compatibility has to be undertaken,” said Mr Swinney. “I think the thing that’s changed is the geopolitical situation that is surrounding us just now, and the huge volatility that we’re now dealing with.
“I can’t give you a definitive answer about Jackdaw and Rosebank because the climate compatibility assessment has got to be undertaken.
“What I’m saying is that I think we’ve got to look at the geopolitical situation that we now face and recognise that we’re experiencing much greater risk to our energy security as a consequence of what’s happening there.”
A change of tack on oil and gas would represent a significant shift in SNP policy under Mr Swinney’s predecessors Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf who were both hostile to more drilling.
Mr Swinney has already accepted that oil gas will remain part of the energy mix for some time to come but has generally been seen to follow the line of a “presumption against new drilling”.
He has also accepted that oil and gas “is declining too fast” and that jobs in renewables are not being created quickly enough to replace them.
“So we’ve got to take that into account in the decisions that we make,” he said, and agreed that imports of oil and gas were “more climate damaging” than that produced in the UK.
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