Co-opting the energy transition: How European energy companies justify strategy in CEO letters

Incumbent energy companies are under increasing pressure to align their strategies with the goals of the energy transition. CEO letters—as a genre of strategic financial communication addressed primarily to investors—provide a privileged site for examining how this alignment is discursively constructed and justified. This study investigates how major publicly listed energy companies in Germany, Poland, and Spain legitimize strategic investment decisions in their CEO letters between 2019 and 2023. Applying an argumentation-analytical framework grounded in practical reasoning, we systematically reconstruct the goals, values, means–goal relations, and contextual conditions that structure corporate justifications of energy transition strategies across a corpus of 45 CEO letters.
Our findings reveal a distinctive variant of green growth discourse in which decarbonization is not merely aligned with financial and broader business objectives, but is actively co-opted to absorb broader socio-economic and geopolitical imperatives. Companies present fossil-based bridging technologies—including LNG, hydrogen, and efficiency upgrades to existing infrastructure—as indispensable to supply security and societal stability, thereby casting incremental transition pathways as both prudent and responsible. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, geopolitical arguments—particularly energy independence and strategic sovereignty—have gained traction as justificatory resources, connecting corporate investment rationales to broader narratives of national resilience.
By tracing the relational architecture of corporate argumentation, this study shows how incumbent firms discursively neutralize demands for structural transformation while presenting continuity as compatible with transition. Methodologically, it demonstrates the contribution of argumentation analysis to discursive research in strategic financial communication, offering analytical rigor, transparency, and traceability.