The tests so far amount to the karate demonstration where someone chops through a stack of two-by-fours: Most impressive but not a commercially viable way to chop wood. The next step is obvious — Quaise needs to get out and drill into the earth. That’s coming soon.
Quaise obtained a test site in north Houston where it can drill up to 100 feet underground. The 100-kilowatt gyrotron system I saw firing up in the warehouse has already been moved to this field site, where Quaise is connecting it to a full-scale drilling rig owned by partner Nabors Industries; its mast will soar 140 feet tall. Drilling should begin in April, cutting into an existing well stuffed with rock samples — outdoors but still a controlled environment.
Soon after, Quaise will swap that out for a new 1-megawatt system, delivering 10 times the power to speed up subsurface boring and maintain an 8-inch-diameter hole, bigger than the initial test holes. That device will use a comparable amount of power as is used by conventional drilling rigs, Araque noted.
Drilling 100 feet down is a start but far from sufficient. The company also secured a quarry site near Austin that provides the opportunity to drill nearly 500 feet through pure granite. Once the technology graduates to drilling thousands of feet, Quaise plans to piggyback on the existing drilling industry with its “BYOG” approach.
“Bring a gyrotron, bring the waveguide, bring the power supply, plug it into the drilling rig,” Araque said. “There’s thousands of drilling rigs in the world. You just go and plug and play into them.”
New geothermal power plants coming soon
If and when the time comes to drill for actual power plants, Quaise aims to ride conventional drilling technologies as far as they’ll go. The plan is to hire traditional rigs to burrow through the first 2 to 3 kilometers of subsurface (up to nearly 2 miles) until the drill hits what’s known as basement rock.
After hitting basement rock, Quaise will swap drill bits for its millimeter-wave drill and blast to about 5 miles deep in favorable locations — even that far down, some places have easier access to heat than others. Operators will pump nitrogen gas into the hole to flush out the dust from vaporized rock as the drill moves ever deeper.
Quaise leaders did not disclose a timeline for the company’s first commercial deep drilling. At that point, Quaise will need to build an actual power plant and navigate the myriad permitting and transmission-connection hurdles that face renewables developers broadly. The company is running this development process in-house and already has multiple geothermal leases secured, a spokesperson noted.
In the meantime, a handful of other startups are making headway on commercial-scale geothermal plants, albeit with different approaches.
Fervo Energy has applied fracking technologies to geothermal drilling to make the process more efficient; after a successful 3.5-megawatt trial project in Nevada, the company began drilling the 400-megawatt Cape Station plant in Utah.
Closer in principle to Quaise, a Canadian startup called Eavor is developing ways to drill deeper than was economically practical before. Instead of reinventing the drill itself, Eavor defends it with insulation and “shock cooling” to avoid crumbling in deep, high-temperature rock.
“Most oil and gas directional drilling tools are rated for 180C temperatures, [but Eavor’s] insulated drilling pipe has a cooling effect on the tools making them work at even higher temperatures just by insulating the pipe,” a company spokesperson said in an email.
Eavor notched a big win in 2023, when it drilled a test well in New Mexico to depths of 3.4 miles and through rock as hot as 250 degrees Celsius. Now it’s drilling a closed-loop project in Germany to generate 8.2 megawatts of electricity and 64 megawatts of heating.
Taken together, geothermal innovators like Quaise, along with the somewhat less science-fictiony enhanced geothermal startups like Fervo and Eavor, could produce the “clean firm” power that energy modelers say is necessary to balance out cheap wind and solar in the quest to decarbonize the electrical grid.
“Advanced geothermal technologies could unlock a terawatt-scale resource that can deliver clean energy on demand,” said Jesse Jenkins, an authority on net-zero modeling and assistant professor at Princeton University. “That would be an enormously valuable tool to have in our toolbox.”
Quaise could in theory supply those other geothermal innovators with a better type of drill to extend their range. But Araque insisted Quaise wants to be in the power generation business, not the widget business.
The company also has to manage an evident chokepoint in its development: those highly specialized gyrotrons. Quaise owns four, Araque said; the global gyrotron supply chain currently can’t handle an order for 10 more. That’s not an issue while Quaise works its way up to deep subsurface drilling, but the growth trajectory of the gyrotron suppliers could limit how much power-plant drilling the company can perform simultaneously in the future.
The work to extend from boring a few inches of rock to miles of it should not be underestimated, but Quaise has already crossed the more daunting chasm from never melting rock with an energy beam to doing so daily.
