Contribution short abstract

This paper explores the role of false solutions in the mature and declining basins of the UK and Denmark, where capital’s capacity to reproduce itself through continued extraction is structurally constrained. In these cases, false solutions manage the contradictions of decline.

Contribution long abstract

Fossil fuel incumbents increasingly deploy false solutions to ensure control over energy systems and maintain profit, while accommodating and diluting demands for structural transformation. Existing analyses tend to conceptualise false solutions as global ideational, institutional, and technological strategies that legitimise incumbent power and neutralise pressures for fossil fuel phase-outs. Yet these approaches often overlook the material and political economic conditions in which such strategies are embedded.

This paper shifts attention to mature and declining basins, where capital’s capacity to reproduce itself through continued extraction is structurally constrained. In these late-stage regimes, false solutions serve not only to defend incumbents’ authority but also to manage the contradictions of decline - creating new accumulation opportunities and shaping the terms on which labour, communities, and the state confront an inevitable downturn.

Through a comparative analysis of the offshore fossil fuel industries in the United Kingdom and Denmark, we examine how incumbents mobilise false solutions - in particular, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies - to recalibrate industrial relations and align workers, unions, and policymakers with specific technological pathways. In contexts where investment in new extraction is flatlining and end-dates for production are increasingly salient, false solutions take on a distinct function: they operate as instruments of political economic restructuring that maintain legitimacy, reconfigure labour–capital relations, and create new sites of accumulation beyond the viability of continued extraction.