Quaise Energy Wants to Dig Us out of the Energy Deficit
Vaporize rocks with microwaves to bust out some clean, and much-needed, geothermal energy? It sounds like 1950s science fiction, but if Quaise Energy is on the right track, it could be 2020s science fact.
Recently Quaise CFO and head of corporate development Kevin Bonebrake (was there ever a better name for a new-generation sci-fi rock-busting hero?) came on the Business for Good podcast to tell us more about his four-year-old, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company’s goals. Here are the details:
Progress towards clean energy — so close and yet so far
Inside the Earth, temperatures get almost as hot as the surface of the Sun. (I didn’t believe this, but turns out it’s true.) If we could tap into the clean heat energy generated only a dozen miles beneath our feet, we could potentially solve many of our society’s energy problems. It’s getting to it that’s the issue.
When accessing fossil fuel deposits, it’s only a matter of drilling down a few kilometers. There are some parts of the world in which tapping down to reach active volcano energy is a feasible source of geothermal energy. New Zealand and Iceland are notable examples of how to harness geothermal energy from volcanoes. New Zealand derives close to 20 percent of its electricity from geothermal sources. Iceland generates about 25 percent of its total domestic electricity output from geothermal energy.
Iceland is home to about 200 volcanoes, although it wasn’t until recently that it invested heavily in developing its geothermal capacities. From 1990 to 2014, the country achieved a whopping 1,700-percent growth in its use of geothermal energy. The increase was the result of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project, which tapped into geothermal activity at levels 15,000 feet below the Earth’s surface.
Most of the world’s population, though, doesn’t live near active volcanoes. In most of our significant population centers, we don’t have the ability to drill deep enough to access the geothermal energy churning away so far below the surface. Conventional drilling methodologies just can’t do the work of getting 5 to 10 miles down: Mechanical drill bits can’t cope with the hardness of the rock — or the heat at that depth.
Quaise Energy — confidence and innovation
That’s the problem Quaise Energy wants to solve. To date, the start-up has raised $75 million to support innovative drilling techniques that promise to reach deeper into geothermal energy sources than previous efforts. Its recent Series A funding round brought in about $50 million of that total based on a demonstration of proof of concept in its drilling methods.
Rather than traditional mechanical drill bits, Quaise uses microwaves to vaporize rock formations. The idea is to drill thousands of holes, each one 8 inches wide, deep into the ground adjacent to existing power plants. This design would give the facilities instant, uninterrupted access to enough geothermal energy to replace coal. Assuming the concept pans out, it should be a quickly scalable way to address the looming climate change catastrophe by cutting out much of our use of fossil fuels.
This technology emerged out of work done at the MIT Plasma Science Fusion Center. Quaise co-founder and CEO Carlos Araque’s previous experience includes his work as technical director at The Engine, the MIT fund designed to commercialize technology like this, technology with big and scalable potential. For Carlos and his team at Quaise, the supercritical geothermal energy they are working to generate offers humanity a not-to-be-missed opportunity.
Explaining the science
Before joining Quaise, Kevin Bonebrake spent most of his career working in conventional energy investment. Kevin earned his graduate degree from the Helsinki University of Technology Naval Architecture department, where he concentrated on the applications of industrial lasers.
He previously worked for Morgan Stanley as a managing director in the firm’s Global Natural Resources investment banking division, and for Citigroup’s Global Energy, Power and Chemicals investment team as a vice president. He went on to serve as a managing director for the start-up Lazard, an energy-focused investment banking firm.
In our conversation, Kevin pointed out that the Earth generates about 40 terawatts of energy every second, due to radiating heat moving outward from its core and natural radioactive decay. (We’re not burning up here on the Earth’s surface, simply because all the heat produced dissipates as it is dispersed across the revolving planet. But the farther under the surface you go, the hotter it gets.)
Since today humanity consumes a total of “only” about 20 terawatts of energy every second, you can see the potential.
Quaise is trying to harness this geothermal energy, to make it more power-dense and cost-efficient, so that it produces steam at a temperature and pressure sufficient to run already-operating coal-fired power plants. The company’s goal is to help reach climate change mitigation goals by the year 2050.
An explanation of Quaise’s new drilling technology: Think of your microwave oven, which works based on a principle of physics known as dielectric heating. It uses electromagnetic waves to rotate the water molecules in food, which produces the kinetic energy that then heats the food. The heat generated this way is produced quickly, and it is distributed throughout the body of the food item.
The principle that powers Quaise’s technology is the same, only using more powerful microwaves to heat rock enough to vaporize it.
What happens to all the particulate matter the process generates as a byproduct? The company’s process forces air down into the drilled holes to drive it out and capture it at the surface. In this way they are similar to drill bits that bring residue to the surface.
And the process, while difficult, doesn’t go anywhere near the depths you might think of if you ever saw Journey to the Center of the Earth. It’s deeper than we’ve been able to drill to consistently with conventional techniques, but Kevin points out that it’s still relatively shallow when you consider that the Earth’s radius is about 4,000 miles.
Efficient, renewable, and scalable
Kevin further notes that Quaise’s drilling is on par with fossil fuels in terms of the possible power density relative to the surface area of land used. And the geothermal energy produced is estimated to be about 10 to 100 times greater in terms of power density than other renewable technologies.
What’s “power density”? Kevin helped us understand it better by explaining that it’s calculated in terms of the amount of land, labor, and materials needed to generate a defined amount of energy. Think of how much land a typical solar-cell array covers compared with the size of one of Quaise’s eight-inch holes, and you’ll see the difference. That’s why the ability to scale geothermal energy operations is increasingly attractive.
Quaise is a work in progress. It used donated equipment to construct a prototype operation in Tennessee at Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
Now that the company has taken the technology from academia into the larger world, they’ve established an engineering center in Houston, where Kevin is based, to demonstrate their hole-drilling process. Over the next few years, they intend to try and produce steam from a hole drilled at 500-degree Celsius temperatures, enough energy to run a power plant. By about 2028, they want to retrofit a coal-fired plant and connect it to one of their geothermal fields.
Their success could just be one of the game-changers we’re looking for in the increasingly urgent search for clean energy. So go check out the episode. I think you’ll get as much out of it as I did.
