In a surprising and reports say legally unprecedented turn of events, environmental group Friends of the Earth Scotland (FoE) has been granted the right to intervene in Ineos’ legal challenge to the Scottish government’s permanent moratorium on fracking.

The Court of Session in Edinburgh, Scotland’s highest court, will start an initial procedural hearing today, May 1, with the substantive case due to start on May 8.

FoE said it planned to make a formal submission to the court in the “public interest” and stressed that it wants to ensure the court hears arguments about climate change. The group argues that Scotland is required to ban fracking in order to urgently cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, in line with legally binding climate targets.

The Swiss-based chemical producer’s UK shale gas arm, Ineos Shale, is pursuing the challenge in conjunction with another shale gas company, Reach CSG of Aberdeen, Scotland.

Legal experts commenting to the press when the plans to go to court were announced said they expected Ineos’ lawyers to question the irreversibility of the ban, due to its being embedded in the national planning framework rather than law.

In launching its call for a judicial review in January, Ineos said it believed there were “very serious errors” in the Scottish government’s decision-making process, leading to an effective ban on onshore unconventional oil and gas extraction throughout the country. These included “a failure to adhere to proper statutory process and a misuse of ministerial power.

From the outset, the chemical producer has suggested that it deserves financial compensation for the preliminary work on shale gas it has done so far, but Ineos watchers also noted that chairman and principal shareholder, Jim Ratcliffe, does not back down easily. The Glasgow-based national newspaper Sunday Herald said it understands that Ineos’ claim for damages could run to “hundreds of millions of pounds”

Friends of the Earth said it is “confident” that the government’s process to ban fracking was robust and fair, especially as a two-year process had looked at “mountains of scientific evidence” that speaks of the risks of the unconventional oil and gas industry to the environment, climate and people’s health.