Quaise “Proof Of Concept” Demo Goes Live In Texas – CleanTechnica

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More than a decade ago, Paul Woskov, a research engineer in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, noticed something about microwaves that others had missed. Given enough power and focused just so, they can literally blast holes in basalt and granite. That idea is the basis for an MIT spinoff known as Quaise, which proposes to use microwaves to drill holes deep enough to access zones of super hot temperatures located up to 12,000 feet below the surface of the Earth.

Basalt and granite were created by intense heat billions of years ago as the Earth was forming. Today, a band of rock between 2 and 4 kilometers thick lies beneath the Earth’s surface. Below it, the temperature of the Earth is hot enough — 374º C (700º F) — to turn water into supercritical steam, which behaves more like a liquid than a gas and is ideal for spinning turbines to generate electricity.

Once the holes are bored, water gets pumped underground and supercritical steam comes back to the surface. Quaise believes there is enough heat below the surface of the Earth to generate virtually all the electricity humanity might need for millions of years. Do we have your attention yet?

Early in the 21st century, Paul Woskov was working on nuclear fusion and using microwaves to heat the plasma needed to get a fusion reaction started. [Nuclear fission splits atoms apart. Nuclear fusion smooshes them together. Both processes create enormous amounts of energy.] He was using gyrotrons to create the microwaves for his research. Then in 2008, the MIT Energy Initiative published a request for proposals for new geothermal drilling technologies. Woskov thought gyrotrons might be just what MITEI was looking for.

“Gyrotrons are commercially available. You could place an order with a company and have a system delivered right now,” he told Zach Winn of MIT News in 2022. “They haven’t been well publicized in the general science community, but those of us in fusion research understood they were very powerful beam sources — like lasers but in a different frequency range. I thought, why not direct these high-power beams, instead of into fusion plasma, down into rock and vaporize the hole?”

In 2018, Woskov’s idea got the attention of Carlos Araque, who graduated from MIT in 2001 and spent his career in the oil and gas industry. At that time, he was the technical director of MIT’s investment fund The Engine. Araque partnered with Matt Houde, who had been working with geothermal company AltaRock Energy to found Quaise.

Quaise Demo Near Houston

In an email to CleanTechnica, Quaise said it has now completed its first demonstration outside the laboratory at a site near Houston, Texas. On May 21, Araque told a group composed of reporters, potential investors, and Lauren Boyd, director of the Geothermal Technologies Office at the US Department of Energy:

“Geothermal energy is available everywhere on massive scales. If you take all fossil, all nuclear, and all other forms of renewable energy combined, they’re not even a millionth of a millionth of the thermal stores of energy” below the Earth’s surface. “It’s mind boggling, and to get it, we only have to go down two to twelve miles. That’s how close we are to infinite clean energy no matter where you are in the world. This is not a company built to develop a cool drilling gadget. We aim to become a geothermal developer. Our product is not a drill bit. Our product is clean heat and energy that is abundant, reliable, and affordable on a global scale,” said Araque.

Now, before you break out the trumpets, understand that Quaise has a long way to go yet before it reaches its goal of boring holes 2 to 12 miles deep. In Texas, the company used an existing oil rig to drill a hole, then lowered columns of granite about nine inches in diameter and 80 feet long into it. In the first demonstration phase, the Quaise microwave technology drilled down through the granite to a depth of 10 feet.

That was a significant achievement, considering its early testing resulted in holes just a few inches deep. The week after the demonstration, the Quaise team successfully drilled to 30 feet for the first time. In the next phase, the goal is to reach 40 feet. For those of you who may scoff at such modest achievements, we have two words for you — Kitty Hawk.

The gyrotron used for the demo near Houston had a power of 100 kilowatts. Next month, Quaise will take delivery of a much larger gyrotron with one megawatt of power. “That is commercially relevant. We aim to get it to the field over the next two years,” Araque said. The company is preparing for another demonstration in Marble Falls, Texas, in July, where teams will drill multiple holes 130 meters (425 feet) deep into an actual granite outcrop for the first time.

Fervo Energy is also testing new geothermal energy technology that leverages horizontal drilling techniques developed by the fracking industry and it is further along the path toward actually generating clean energy from the heat stored beneath the surface of the Earth. It has signed a deal with Microsoft to supply it with 115 MW of clean energy.

A Contrarian View Of Geothermal Energy

As I was writing this report, I noticed my colleague Michael Barnard, who is way smarter than me, has weighed in on geothermal power and some interesting thoughts on the matter. He notes that the geothermal sector likes to talk about the supposed “gaps and limits of wind, solar, and storage. Geothermal firms are quick to suggest that batteries remain too expensive and transmission too complicated. A common refrain is that utilities that “buy too much wind and solar start to need something firm, or a baseload to support it.”

“For decades, the grid was built around the idea that massive coal and nuclear plants would run 24/7, providing a constant, inflexible supply of electricity. That paradigm worked in a world where electricity demand was predictable and fossil fuels were the unquestioned backbone of energy systems. But today’s grid isn’t that grid. Wind and solar now dominate new generation capacity, and modern electricity markets prioritize firmed and flexible power — resources that can ramp up and down as needed rather than sitting there stubbornly running at full tilt. In a system where supply varies with weather and demand surges unpredictably, baseload isn’t just irrelevant, it’s a liability. [Emphasis added.]

I always find Michael’s analyses to be pithy and precise. The one thing that is disrupting the power industry the most today is the astronomical increases in data centers, which claim they need a steady amount of power 24/7. Thermal generation is suddenly all the rage again, as the conventional wisdom seems to be that no way are renewables up to the task.

The question then becomes whether we humans are willing to sacrifice a sustainable future so AI can complete our children’s term papers. It is interesting that a few years ago, critics were warning that electric vehicles would crash the electrical grid, but now everyone is celebrating the enormous new demands for power created by AI. There is some cognitive dissonance there that we need to better understand. Is the idea of baseload power an anachronism that is leading us down a primrose path?