The European Union’s green energy transition has had divergent meanings. In 2019, the European Green Deal sought to make the EU “climate-neutral” (Net Zero) by 2050, especially by phasing out fossil fuels. However, the European Commission sponsored new advisory bodies through which transnational energy companies managed to shape visions of European energy futures. They rebranded natural gas as a “transition fuel”, while reframing the green transition for their political-economic hegemony. Rival agendas can be understood as sociotechnical-spatial imaginaries along divergent lines. In the European Commission-industry common vision, the energy transition would foresee complementary roles for natural gas and renewable energy. In particular, Carbon Capture Usage and Storage would decarbonize natural gas by producing “clean hydrogen”, which would be transported through “hydrogen-ready” gas pipelines, called valleys or connectors. This hegemonic vision justified approving and subsidizing more infrastructure for natural gas, including liquified natural gas, alongside policy incentives to create a new market for hydrogen fuel and carbon dioxide. All this extends the techno-market fixes of earlier European policy frameworks and creates frictions when encountering real-world places. National examples include rival agendas for Malta about an idealized space, and likewise Germany’s plan for a hydrogen network fuelled by imports potentially transforming Germany’s spatial relations with the Global South. Some mainstream civil society organizations (CSOs) have accommodated the hegemonic imaginary. By contrast, industry-critical CSOs have been warning that the clean hydrogen fix would lock in natural gas for decades. They counterposed means for the public sector to expand renewable energy along lines soon replacing fossil fuels.