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Geothermal energy is a promising energy source and is limited by a number of factors, including the need to place plants in areas that are easily accessible by reservoirs deep in the ground. Carlos Araque is seeking to change this situation through his company Quaise, using breakthrough technology developed by MIT.
“We need to go deeper and hotter to truly make geothermal a global resource, so it is no longer a problem of being close to volcanoes, Iceland or typical geothermal areas,” Arak said. But drilling so deep-2 to 12 miles underground-is expensive and time consuming. His company found a solution in research done by Paul Woskov of the MIT Center for Plasma Science and Fusion. Voskov proposed using high-intensity 30 to 300 GHz microwaves from a device called a cyclotron, instead of physical drill bits that wear out quickly and require frequent replacement. “It’s like a magnetron in a microwave oven, but it’s more powerful and efficient,” Araque said.
The idea is to drill a mile or two into the bedrock, passing where oil and gas are usually found; then the gyroscope takes over. The overheated vaporized rock is pushed back to the surface by the pressurized gas. The water then flows into and out of the well, absorbing heat on the way and becoming supercritical steam that drives the turbine. One advantage of this technology is that it mainly uses the long-established infrastructure of the oil, gas, and thermal power industries.
Araque is from Colombia and studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining The Engine, a venture capital firm established by the Institute in 2016, he worked at Schlumberger, an oilfield technology and service provider for 15 years. When Woskov proposed his idea in 2018, the well-known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla suggested that Araque set up a company with funds “on the condition that I will lead it.”
With $23 million in grants and seed funding, Quaise is working with the Department of Energy to expand its technology and build a pilot plant in the western United States by 2024. To Araque’s surprise, he found support in the generally conservative oil and gas industry. “These companies are beginning to understand that they need to embrace [green] Energy transition,” he said.
As the world shifts to cleaner energy sources, Araque believes that geothermal energy will play an important role. “We are talking about the potential of terawatts-not megawatts, not gigawatts, but terawatts,” he said. “But to realize this, we need to accept these very difficult technical tasks. This is exactly what we are trying to do. We want to realize the full potential of geothermal.”
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