Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is reportedly expected to give the go-ahead to the Jackdaw gas field once the emissions assessment has been completed.
While there is unlikely to be a formal decision prior to May's Holyrood election, Whitehall sources have told The Times Miliband is minded to approve the development because he did not consider it incompatible with the government’s carbon reduction commitments.
However, The Times also reports Miliband remains opposed to the Rosebank oil field which he branded an act of "climate vandalism".
That opposition comes in spite of comments from Chancellor Rachel Reeves, and First Minister John Swinney, this week in support of both Rosebank and Jackdaw.
Writing in The Times, Sir James Dyson has also called for the government to support domestic oil and gas production and slammed what he called Miliband's "perverse destruction of our energy assets".
He said: "If it wasn’t obvious before, recent weeks have rammed home the imperative of having our own energy and food production here in the UK. National security in an increasingly volatile world can come only from maximising our resources, yet the government chooses to do the opposite.
"Sir Keir Starmer talks about acting in Britain’s national interest but is pursuing policies that force us to depend on unreliable imports for our most vital resources: energy and food.
"Labour has been incredibly slow to act on North Sea gas drilling and continues to block oil drilling and fracking while recklessly buying energy from other countries. This is folly. As President Trump likes to remind us, the US has its own energy so can survive without the Strait of Hormuz being open, while Britain, under Ed Miliband’s perverse destruction of our energy assets, cannot."