Quaise Energy, an MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) spinout developing geothermal energy, hosted the first of several live public demonstrations of their drilling technology this September at Marble Falls, TX. The company proved their technology can drill into the granite outcrop in a quarry with pure energy instead of physical drilling bits.
Carlos Araque ’01, SM ’02, the CEO of Quaise, calls their technology “the first drilling innovation in 100 years.” Araque believes this technology could allow the world to access clean, renewable geothermal energy on a scale equal to fossil fuels. MITEI provided early funding for the technology Quaise is using.
Quaise’s drilling system centers around a device called a gyrotron that produces millimeter waves and has been used in research and manufacturing for decades. The idea of applying gyrotons to the extraction of geothermal energy came from Paul Woskov, a research engineer in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. After working with gyrotrons in nuclear fusion experiments, Woskov answered a 2008 request for proposals from MITEI for new geothermal drilling technologies, recognizing this potential application.
“[Gyrotrons] 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,” Woskov told MIT News. “I thought, why not direct these high-power beams, instead of into fusion plasma, down into rock and vaporize the hole?”
With funding from MITEI, Woskov conducted tests to prove his concept. Around 2018, Araque, who was the technical director of MIT’s The Engine at the time, became interested in Woskov’s work. That same year, Araque and Matt Houde, founded Quaise to commercialize Woskov’s discovery.
In July, Quaise successfully drilled a 118-meter hole in the field—outside of what was previously controlled experimental conditions. The September demonstration showed that they can drill through some of the hardest rock in the world at a rate of up to five meters per hour. According to Henry Phan, the vice president of engineering at Quaise, today’s commercial operations’ average drilling rate is a tenth of a meter per hour through granite.
At the September demonstration, Araque said, “We aim to make geothermal the workhorse of the energy transition, and we won’t stop until we succeed.”