Rosebank is the final major untapped oil location in the United Kingdom, located 80 miles west of Shetland and holding around 300 million barrels of oil.
It is two times larger than the contentious Cambo oil field.
Another unexplored gas field is 150 miles east of Aberdeen and is called Jackdaw.
Greenpeace and Uplift, two environmental advocacy organizations, had filed lawsuits to prevent the sites’ development for oil.
Green groups filed these legal claims, and the government declared on Thursday that it will no longer contest them.
It comes after a historic ruling by the Supreme Court in June, which mandated that planning applications for extraction projects take into account the environmental effects of burning fossil fuel emissions in addition to the emissions generated during the extraction process.
The new government acknowledged last month that it was illegal to allow a new coal mine in West Cumbria because consideration should have been given to the carbon emissions that would result from burning the coal.
No new fossil fuel project, according to the International Energy Agency, is compatible with the widely acknowledged target of keeping global warming to 1.5°C.
