NICOLA Sturgeon has reaffirmed her opposition to controversial plans to open up a new North Sea oil field – as she insisted the best strategy to end energy reliance on Russia is to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels.

The First Minster stressed the answer to the world relying on Vladimir Putin’s state-owned oil and gas operations amid his invasion of Ukraine is to ramp up a move to renewable forms of energy.

But Ms Sturgeon did suggest that in the short-term, North Sea oil and gas operations may have to ramp up operation to help meet global demand as countries draw up plans to potentially boycott Russian fuels.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s the World at One, the FM was asked if in light of the Ukraine crisis, she would drop her “opposition” to more licences being approved for North Sea fossil fuels developments.

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She said: “For the UK, the dependency on Russian oil and gas is much, much, much less than it is for Europe and for many other counties.

“What I think it means is that we need to yes, consider short-term actions but actually the real lesson of this in terms of removing dependency on Russian oil and gas is accelerating the green transition.

“So for Scotland, the big imperative for environmental reasons but also I think now for geo-security reasons, is to make sure we are moving to renewable, low-carbon sources of energy even more quickly than we had previously planned.”

Ms Sturgeon said that future projects planned for the North Sea, including Cambo near Shetland, will have no bearing on weaning the world off Russian oil and gas.

The decision to grant a licence for the Cambo plans, put on hold by Siccar Point Energy last year, is reserved to the UK Government – but Ms Sturgeon and statutory advisers, the Climate Change Committee, have called for a planned climate compatibility checkpoint to be extended to projects already in the pipeline such as Cambo.

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Ms Sturgeon said: “Even if I was to suddenly change my view on the Cambo oil field, that is not going to change the immediate situation in terms of North Sea oil and gas production.

“My position on the Cambo oil field has not changed. I think it’s really important here that we don’t take ourselves down dead ends in terms of what some of the solutions here are.

“There are real complexities here, really big issues to confront and it will challenge all of us, me included, in terms of some of our fixed positions.

“The biggest lessons here are the ones that we need to learn. Fundamentally, we need to remove our dependency on fossil fuels generally in order to remove our dependency.”

The First Minister was asked if her ambition for Scotland to become net zero by 2045, remains on track.

She said: “Of course it stays.

“We’re talking about population displacement from Ukraine – the biggest that we’ve seen since the Second World War.

“But if we go further into the future we will start to see and we are already seeing some of the population displacements being driven by climate breakdown and the catastrophe of climate change.

“It is utterly inane to suggest that one of our responses to the horror and the tragedy of Ukraine is to suddenly pretend that the climate emergency no longer exists and that we don’t have to make that transition to net zero.”

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She added that “the flow of important exports from the North Sea in current production of course will be part of that mix” in the short-term as the world grapples with a remove away from Russian fuels.

Last week, UK Business and Energy Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, stressed that “the North Sea is our single largest source of gas, with the bulk of our imports coming from reliable Norway”, adding that “unlike Europe, we're not reliant on Russian gas”.

He added that the UK Government will “continue to back North Sea gas for energy security”.

Mr Kwarteng said: “It would be complete madness to turn off our domestic source of gas.

“But the long-term solution is obvious: gas is more expensive than renewable energy, so we need to move away from gas.

“The more cheap, clean power we generate at home, the less exposed we’ll be to global gas markets.”