This month, SPE France had the pleasure of hosting Diego A. Vazquez Anzola as part of the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ prestigious Distinguished Lecturer Programme. Diego’s talk titled“CO₂ Storage Risks and Costs: Busting Perceptions and Myths” was one of the most thought-provoking sessions I have attended in recent memory. With two decades of experience spanning hydrocarbon exploration, CCS project development and sustainable energy, Diego brought rare clarity to a topic that is often clouded by misconception and misplaced pessimism.
His core argument was simple but powerful: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary and technically achievable, but it will only become sustainable if it is investable. The IEA estimates we need to scale from 40 Mt of CO₂ stored today to around 5,000 Mt per year. That gap demands we get serious not just about engineering but also about business models, regulations, and operational realities.
The lecture was structured around five myths that Diego systematically unpacked.
Myth #1 – Long-term Carbon Storage Creates No Real Value
The first misconception Diego tackled is perhaps the most damaging: the idea that CCS is purely a cost centre with no genuine value proposition. He walked us through a spectrum of emerging business models from regulatory “stick” mechanisms (carbon taxes, ETS pricing) to “carrot” incentives (the US 45Q tax credit, Australian Carbon Credit Units) and fully market-driven approaches such as storage-as-a-service or CO₂ utilisation into clean fuels like methanol, e-methane and sustainable aviation fuel.
Real-world projects already demonstrate this: Sleipner in Norway has been operating since 1996; Moomba in Australia came online in 2024; and the Tangguh CCUS project in Indonesia reached FID in 2024. Each of these links CO₂ storage directly to a revenue stream, whether through enhanced gas recovery, carbon credit sales or avoided carbon taxes. The lesson is that CCS works best when it is designed around value generation from the outset, not bolted on as an afterthought.
Myth #2 – Regulations Alone Enable CCS Projects
A widely held belief is that a strong regulatory framework is sufficient to unlock CCS investment. Diego challenged this directly. Regulation is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Drawing on frameworks from the EU Directive 2009/31/EC, the US EPA Class VI rules, Australia’s OPGGS Act and the UK Energy Act 2008, he showed that while these provide the structural backbone, they are deliberately non-prescriptive, focused on risk management rather than dictating technical solutions.
What matters, Diego argued, is the ability to translate regulatory requirements into practical, proportionate work plans. The regulation sets the boundary; the technical and commercial teams must do the rest.
Myth #3 – Suitable Storage Sites Are Everywhere
This was one of the talk’s most sobering moments. When comparing depleted hydrocarbon fields and saline aquifers as storage options, the trade-offs are significant. Depleted fields offer proven containment and better-understood geology, but come with legacy well complications and limited scale. Saline aquifers have enormous theoretical capacity, but injectivity, connectivity, and monitorability are often poorly characterised, requiring exploratory and appraisal wells before injection can begin.
The implication is clear: finding a genuinely suitable storage site, one that ticks the boxes on containment, injectivity, monitorability and scalability, is harder and more expensive than commonly assumed. Site selection is not a desktop exercise.
Myth #4 – CO₂ Injection is Simply the Reverse of Hydrocarbon Production
This myth underestimates how thermodynamically unusual CO₂ behaves. Diego gave a compelling explanation of the Joule-Thomson effect: when CO₂ is forced through a pressure drop (as at a wellhead), it can cool to extreme temperatures, in real field cases as low as -45°C to -85°C. This creates serious material integrity challenges that simply do not arise in conventional production operations. Equipment qualification for these conditions is non-trivial, and ignoring it has real cost and safety consequences.
It was a reminder that CO₂ injection is its own engineering discipline, not a mirror image of production.
Myth #5 – Legacy Wells Are Easily Repurposed
The final myth is one I suspect many in the audience had not fully considered. The presence of legacy abandoned wells in or near a storage reservoir is one of the most significant risk factors for CO₂ containment. Old cement can become brittle when exposed to CO₂; leakage pathways can develop along casing strings, through cement fractures or between cement and rock. Diego cited research showing corrosion rates on the order of 2–4 mm per year are manageable in isolation, but the brittleness induced by CO₂ exposure is the deeper concern.
Repurposing a legacy well for CO₂ injection is not a shortcut, but it requires rigorous integrity evaluation and, in many cases, significant remedial work.
Key Takeaway: Value, Maturation Time and Scalability
Diego closed with a framework that I found genuinely useful. He proposed that the best measure of a CCS project’s success is not simply whether it stores CO₂ safely, but whether it performs well across three dimensions: value generation, maturation time, and scalability. CCS hubs, which are clusters of emitters sharing transport and storage infrastructure, score well on all three and are increasingly the model that front-runner projects are converging on.
Government incentives help, Diego noted, but they are not the primary driver of the best projects. The projects that work are those built around a coherent value proposition from day one.
It was an exceptional evening of knowledge-sharing. My thanks to Diego for a genuinely memorable session and to everyone who joined us.
For more information on the SPE Distinguished Lecturer Programme, visit www.spe.org/dl.
