Been looking for some more details on Quaise Energy, which definitely has the coolest sounding tech for GeoThermal extraction – frickin’ laser beams.
Quaise Energy, has closed a $21 Million Series A1 financing round led by Prelude Ventures and Safar Partners. Mitsubishi Corporation and Standard Investments are among several new investors participating in the round. This latest funding will enhance the company’s field operations and strengthen its supply chain position, while ongoing product development will continue with pre-existing capital.
Underground lightning is one of the many perils of using fusion technology to drill the deepest hole on Earth to unlock limitless clean energy from its core, according to one of the masterminds behind the plan.
Using a gyrotron to drill through the Earth’s crust in a quest for unlimited power may sound like sci-fi. But this is exactly what US start-up Quaise Energy, which counts Japan’s Mitsubishi among its backers, plans to do.
“Earth is a massive battery” and an “incredibly untapped source of clean renewable energy,” Quaise co-founder Matthew Houde told Recharge.
Geothermal is still a niche source of renewable energy compared to wind, solar and hydropower, but Houde believes it is “poised for a breakthrough.”
Geothermal is an “ideal complement” to intermittent energy from wind and solar farms, he said, because it provides a steady baseload of power.
Another “huge plus” is that geothermal is “primed to take advantage of the largest industry in the world today, which is the oil and gas sector,” as he said it requires “a lot of the same exact skills and workers.”
Quaise believes its plan to drill “deeper, hotter and faster” could unlock geothermal power at terawatt-scale. This would be transformative in a world that had 3.4TW of capacity from renewables at the end of last year.
Fusion tech will ‘vaporise’ rock
At the heart of Quaise’s plan to upend the global renewables sector is a gyrotron, a technology somewhat ironically designed to advance a parallel quest for limitless clean power – nuclear fusion.
A gyrotron uses a powerful laser-like beam to generate high-power microwaves in the millimetre range to heat and control plasma, the fuel scientists use in fusion reactors.
Quaise, which spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2018, will use those high-power microwaves to “vaporise rock” and drill up to 20km into the Earth’s crust.
Quaise says steam produced at this depth is around 500°C, the same temperature that modern coal and gas-fired power plants operate at.
All this makes Quaise “quite unique,” said Houde, who claims that drilling deeper and hotter than competitors will allow the start-up to generate power at the same cost as wind and solar.
It also means Quaise could deliver geothermal power in places currently impossible, like the eastern US and many areas of Europe, freeing the energy source from its current geographical chains.
Breaking Soviet Record
If Quaise gets anywhere close to hitting its ultimate goal of drilling 20km into the Earth, it will have not just beaten but decimated the current record for the deepest human-made hole.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole, all 12,262 metres of it, was drilled by the Soviets in a Cold War-fuelled competition with the US – a somewhat less fashionable antipode to the Space Race.
It took the Soviets 20 years until Houde said they ran into a problem at what locals call the “well to hell”. With temperatures approaching 200°C, the Soviets were “no longer able to cool the equipment” and it stopped working.
The gyrotron allows Quaise to sidestep this problem, said Houde.
While Quaise will use conventional drilling for the first few kilometres, once it gets further down and switches to the gyrotron, “we don’t have novel mechanical tools and electronics that are down in the borehole at these very high temperatures.”
This is because the gyrotron will sit on the Earth’s surface. All that goes in the hole at this stage is a “simple, corrugated metallic pipe,” known as a waveguide, said Houde. The gyrotron will beam its microwaves through this to vaporise the rock kilometres beneath the surface.
Drilling down 20km is a “shoot for the moon fall among the stars kinda goal,” admits Houde. If Quaise does get that deep, he said it could tap superhot geothermal power “theoretically anywhere.”
But he said even getting to 10-15km would mean Quaise, which is planning the first field tests using its technology this year, can realise its terawatt-scale geothermal ambition.
Using fusion technology to drill the deepest hole on Earth brings complex challenges.
But in simple terms, said Houde, they are as follows: “We need to get the power down the hole, get the rock out of the hole, and then keep the hole open, without it collapsing.”
The gyrotron is excellent at sending lots of energy across long distances, with modelling showing it can hit efficiencies of 80-90%. But for this to work they need to ensure that a pipe stretching up to 20km underground is “relatively straight” with no “kinks or discontinuities.”
Failure to do this could result in arcing, said Houde, where microwaves hitting a discontinuity produce “lightning in the pipe” – “like if you put aluminium foil in your microwave accidentally.”
When the microwaves hit the rock, the vapour produced is so hot it “ionises into a plasma,” said Houde. This is less the “lightning bolt” of arcing and “more like a flame,” he said.
If the plasma “builds up too much” it can be an issue.
But the rock does have to be so completely vapourised that the particles left over can be lifted out of the hole with a “purge gas,” he said. Otherwise, the participles could “stick and plug up” the space between the waveguide and the hole.
Quaise will also have to get “creative” on how to stop the hole collapsing in on itself, said Houde. This is because it cannot use the drilling muds usually used to balance the pressure as the waveguide needs to be able to transmit the microwaves through.
There is also a supply chain problem, said Houde. Gyrotrons are primarily built for fusion research and are not “standardised and optimised for the drilling conditions we want.” Neither are they “reliable and rugged against the elements,” he said.
I’ve been following geo-thermal efforts since they started drilling in my back yard, Newberry, but have always been dubious for a couple related issues: a 20km drill-bit? Please. And 20km of pipe ~ both pipe and drill-bit capable of withstanding those temperatures? Until they can figure out how to vitrify the walls of the drill-hole simultaneously with vaporizing the rock it’s the same problem. And how are you gonna’ get both the volume and pressure of gasses down to the bottom requisite to pushing 20km of debris out
The theory, I suppose, is that the vaporization itself would create enough pressure to send the material shooting back up the pipe. Likewise, the surrounding rock would be vitrified in the process.
In any case, the Series 1A investment money is for real world proof-of-concept. The technology wouldn’t be a simple win/lose issue, either: If the technology is only cost-effective, say, only down to 5km, there is still some value in that.
I say we have a 50/50 chance that gyrotron goes unstable, crosses streams, and creates total protonic reversal in the mantle, causing Earth to explode at the speed of light. In that case, we wouldn’t have to worry about catastrophic climate change any more.
‘Geothermal is an “ideal complement” to intermittent energy from wind and solar farms, he said, because it provides a steady baseload of power.’
Geothermal is essentially the same as nuclear – you run water (other fluids are available) past hot rocks, and pipe that heat to where it’s useful. The difference with nuclear is, instead of trying to exploit those rocks in the bowels of the Earth, you dig up the hottest bits where they’re abundant, refine them and take them to where you need them, then use them there at your convenience. Enthusiasts of intermittent energy claim, though, that nuclear can’t ramp up and down fast enough, and far enough, to match the vagaries of weather power. It can to some extent – from 25% to 100% at 5% per minute, for the Westinghouse AP1000. Steam geothermal plants can only ramp that fast by venting the heat, and at risk of maintenance problems. Easier to just curtail the wind and solar, when they’re surplus to requirements.
(1) This is about a new proof-of-concept form of geothermal technology.
(2) If, once established, this geothermal power plant technology took as long to implement as the complex funding and construction of nuclear power plants, you might have a point.
(3) Geothermal, as you so helpfully point out, doesn’t depend on the expensive extraction and refining of politically entangled material. The diffuse nature of heat source in the earth is in effect a safety feature.
(4) Decommissioning a geothermal power plant entails stopping up some holes and building a children’s playground on top.