This week Rethink Energy has posted a video interview with Carlos Araque, CEO of Quaise Energy, who says he has a clear path to deliver dispatchable baseload electricity at $0.03 per kWh ($30 per MWh) using traditional geothermal techniques, but using a maser (millimeter wave energy) to drill reliably and cheaply.
The core Quaise proposition is to drill through tough rock without drill bits which break. They break with alarming regularity, resulting in pulling a drilling rig out perhaps 3 or 4 kilometers, just to change the bit, wasting days of rig time. This results in drilling costs of many $1,000s for each meter drilled. Araque’s target is $400 per meter, using a new millimeter wave gyrotron, which generates millimeter size electromagnetic waves using output frequencies between 30 GHz and 300 GHz. This will melt straight through hard rock to provide access to deep geothermal heat without complex drilling equipment.
The company mission is simply to develop the drilling technology and demonstrate that it can produce electricity for less than solar plus battery, and that it is safe in locations which are near metropolitan areas, so that the resulting heat (between 300℃ to 500℃) can be used to move coal and gas steam turbines, and at the same time take any resulting heat, and use it for district or industrial heating.
The one quote that Araque kept pushing through the interview was that “no-one expects the energy transition to be powered purely by wind and solar,” well perhaps he means no-one that grew up in fossil fuels, but we understand what he means. He also says that not one timeline from analysts (except perhaps us) suggest that 2050 will bring about full decarbonization. Well the Annual Primary Electricity forecast from Rethink Energy goes close, and it does this by solar continuing to fall in price, and batteries with it and for deployments to take on mind-boggling numbers, notwithstanding Russia declaring war on anyone else and the Polysilicon crisis resolving itself come 2024.
We discussed this aspect at length and Araque is convinced that oil services businesses “know what they know” and that this will push them towards drilling for “something” and if his design of geothermal was ready at just the right time, it would offer a new direction for thousands of not hundreds of thousands of oil and gas employees.
The full 38 minute interview can be found here and watched for free.
His core argument is that geothermal is the only renewable with zero uncertainty, which offers dispatchable baseload, which doesn’t need storage, and the only way to achieve this cheaply is to “go deeper.”
His timescales suggest that the first power plant driven by 300℃ to 500℃ cheap geothermal would be around 2030, which will then show that this can be done, then the 2030s and 2040s are about scaling up as high as 4 TW of geothermal, which Araque says is the existing global power generation level today. It would represent perhaps 20% to 30% of total electricity by then, and it would share this role with other, less “certain” renewables. At today’s rates geothermal will be just 0.1% to 0.4%, so it really does need this breakthrough that Araque is talking about if it is going to take off.
It was only last month that Quaise raised a $40 million series A round led by Safar Partners, and the company will begin with 1 kilometer deep proof of concept drill, and move slowly up to 20 kilometer drills.
Quaise Energy plans to harness deep geothermal by introducing millimeter wave drilling systems capable of reaching depths of between 10 km and 20 km. At these depths, geothermal energy is power-dense, virtually unlimited, and available everywhere on the planet.
The $40 million will be used to accelerate product development of field-deployable drilling machines to demonstrate the novel drilling technology by 2024. It will also expand its multi-disciplinary teams based in Boston, Houston, and Cambridge, UK, doubling the number of engineers.
Araque sees his company as a pioneer, and is adamant that for 100 years people have been harnessing geothermal, and talks about being a “developer” of energy infrastructure, not an oilfield services company.
On the subject of permitting, Araque asks, “Well what are your options, what are you going to do? – pave your country with solar panels? We can do this on so much less land than solar or wind, and output much more reliable energy.” Will it take 5 or ten years to get permitting as often happens with hydro and wind farms? Not if you do it under the current regulations designed for oil and gas drilling, he says and of course he wants to harness existing power plants – the steam turbines and transmission links of coal and gas plants.
As Araque says, the whole proposition hinges on the price of drilling deep, and Quaise is not the only game in town, and we know of 5 or 6 companies saying the same thing – but that makes it even more likely that at least one of them will get the right breakthroughs at some point, and right now Quaise looks like being one of the best funded.
There are too few global lithium-ion gigafactories for EVs
Annual Primary Electricity 2.0: An evolution in forecasting energy
Talking to Start ups: Caelux and its approach to perovskite
Solar overcomes pricing drag, polysilicon and pandemic
Future Energy markets - an animation
Talking to start ups: Leading Edge, growing crystal solar
Talking to start ups: Quaise Energy and deep geothermal
To contact Rethink please email us at [email protected] Alternatively call us on +44 (0)1179 257019