This startup wants to use beams of energy to drill geothermal wells

This rock-melting drilling technology from the geothermal startup Quaise is certainly unconventional. The company hopes it’s the key to unlocking geothermal energy and making it feasible anywhere.

Geothermal power tends to work best in those parts of the world that have the right geology and heat close to the surface. Iceland and the western US, for example, are hot spots for this always-available renewable energy source because they have all the necessary ingredients. But by digging deep enough, companies could theoretically tap into the Earth’s heat from anywhere on the globe.

That’s a difficult task, though. In some places, accessing temperatures high enough to efficiently generate electricity would require drilling miles and miles beneath the surface. Often, that would mean going through very hard rock, like granite.

Quaise’s proposed solution is a new mode of drilling that eschews the traditional technique of scraping into rock with a hard drill bit. Instead, the company plans to use a gyrotron, a device that emits high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. Today, the fusion power industry uses gyrotrons to heat plasma to 100 million °C, but Quaise plans to use them to blast, melt, and vaporize rock. This could, in theory, make drilling faster and more economical, allowing for geothermal energy to be accessed anywhere.  

Since Quaise’s founding in 2018, the company has demonstrated that its systems work in the controlled conditions of the laboratory, and it has started trials in a semi-controlled environment, including the backyard of its Houston headquarters. Now these efforts are leaving the lab, and the team is taking gyrotron drilling technology to a quarry to test it in real-world conditions. 

Some experts caution that reinventing drilling won’t be as simple, or as fast, as Quaise’s leadership hopes. The startup is also attempting to raise a large funding round this year, at a time when economic uncertainty is slowing investment and the US climate technology industry is in a difficult spot politically because of policies like tariffs and a slowdown in government support. Quaise’s big idea aims to accelerate an old source of renewable energy. This make-or-break moment might determine how far that idea can go. 

Blasting through

Rough calculations from the geothermal industry suggest that enough energy is stored inside the Earth to meet our energy demands for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, says Matthew Houde, cofounder and chief of staff at Quaise. After that, other sources like fusion should be available, “assuming we continue going on that long, so to speak,” he quips. 

“We want to be able to scale this style of geothermal beyond the locations where we’re able to readily access those temperatures today with conventional drilling,” Houde says. The key, he adds, is simply going deep enough: “If we can scale those depths to 10 to 20 kilometers, then we can enable super-hot geothermal to be worldwide accessible.”