Quaise Energy is working to create geothermal wells

The big issue with geothermal energy is that rock doesn't conduct heat very well. When you first bore a hole and pump some water down, it's easy to use the hot rocks to generate steam which can in turn drive a turbine, but doing so cools down the rock the water comes in contact with. Digging deeper, the rock starts out hotter, maybe it takes twice as long to exhaust the initial heat, but it's still going to happen in a matter of hours. Long term, a geothermal well can't extract heat faster than heat flows into the well from lower in the Earth. This heat flow rate is in the milliwatts per square meter range. Now with horizontal boring technology, a single drilling rig might be able to plumb a large area, but even if they got all the energy in a 10km radius, which is about 3 times what current technology is capable of, you're still looking at around 30 MW of thermal heat flux, which would at best produce about 20 MW of electricity. That's like 8 on shore windmills or a 100 acre solar plant. It's a little better given that the heat flow is continuous rather than intermittent, and multiple borehole locations can be connected by pipeline to a single generator station to keep capital costs down, but still this is not a lot of power.

For context, to provide the electricity demand for kansas would require about 35% of the total geothermal flux into kansas. New Jersey's electricity demand is 7 times higher than what its geothermal heat flux could provide. For the whole US, electricity consumption is about 75% of geothermal heat flux if you ignore variations like the yellowstone hotspot.

Geothermal certainly makes sense in certain locations where the heat flux is high and other power sources are problematic - for example iceland is probably the most ideal spot on earth. The technology for extracting geothermal power may also be useful for future efforts to control volcanism (though at this point such plans are highly speculative), so research is warranted. But it is unlikely to ever be more than a minor slice of the world's energy supply, and certainly anyone claiming to solve the issue by just digging deeper is selling snake oil.

I was looking for the reference to The Garin Death Ray book in comments, didn't found, so here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garin_Death_Ray

The writer Aleksey Tolstoy came up with the idea of the laser-like machine that melts the rock in 1920s (maybe also influenced by H.G.Walls), when his science fiction book was first published. In this book a genial engineer Garin creates a beam that can be used both in mining (he wants to get the gold from the mantle, so uses American VC funding to set up a mining operation in Pacific) and as a weapon (he also wants to rule the world, so he uses his machine to destroy German and American competitors).

Interview with Carlos Araque, the founder of Quaise Energy, on the podcast "How I Built This" with Guy Raz:

https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-hib...

Re-using coal plant grid infrastructure is a good idea. So good that it's regularly done today, with big energy consumers like data centres setting up in those areas to save money.

Battery systems and solar are other initiatives that are currently re-using the existing lines.

However, while it makes a nice hook for a story, I'm dubious of any energy system that relies on that minor cost saving in established grids to be viable.

A great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8sjdOjNxIE

I’m generally curious after reading this, what effect does our molten core have on our ambient surface temperature? I can’t imagine much, but it can’t be nil, and I genuinely have no idea.

Paging u/Animats, who had some interesting thoughts on a previous write-up of Quaise which had less info. I think he mentioned that gyrotrons had not been deployed for this use-case and that should make us skeptical because sticking one on the end of a multi-km long drill bit sounds Hard(tm).

An adviser of Quaise (an MIT research engineer) claims:

> “This will happen quickly once we solve the immediate engineering problems of transmitting a clean beam and having it operate at a high energy density without breakdown,” explains Woskov, who is not formally affiliated with Quaise but serves as an advisor. “It’ll go fast because the underlying technology, gyrotrons, are commercially available. You could place an order with a company and have a system delivered right now — granted, these beam sources have never been used 24/7, but they are engineered to be operational for long time periods. In five or six years, I think we’ll have a plant running if we solve these engineering problems. I’m very optimistic.”

Interested in what others think here. Seems overly optimistic to me.

It's a really elegant solution though if it works; the idea of boring a hole in an existing coal plant and repurposing the old steam turbine & transmission equipment sounds like it could really lower the cost.

More geothermal: https://austinvernon.site/blog/geothermalnextsteps.html

If I read this right, this is still the basic geothermal structure and idea but is really an improvement in drilling?

Geothermal seems to be limited by finding suitable places for it, which is generally where you only need to build fairly shallow wells. Building deep wells is expensive. If you can build deeper wells faster and cheaper then it opens it up to move areas.

Is that correct?

Better and cheaper drilling has way more applications thatn building geothermal wells. I mean we need to build tunnels all the time. Cheaper drilling probably has significant applications for the oil and gas industry too.

So if that's true, why the focus on geothermal? I mean I support research into renewables but it's a whole lot easier if, say, you can get the oil and gas industry to pay for your R&D, effectively.

My understanding is that geothermal energy production is still pretty low.

It's also worth noting that boiling water to steam and turning a turbine has inbuilt costs that you can't escape. There's only one power source that directly creates energy and that's solar. Additionally, solar has no moving parts (other than facing PV pannels towards the Sun, optionally).

Fantastic. Geothermal power has such potential. "The amount of heat within 10 000 meters of the earth's surface is estimated to contain 50 000 times more energy than all oil and gas resources worldwide." - The International Renewable Energy Agency

Always fascinated by all of these approaches. Though I still am fascinated, that all energy available to us is derived from gravity in one way or another.

Can someone clarify the geochemistry for me? What happens to the rock vapor? Does it resolidify along the existing wall, or does it recondense into fine particulates, and are those particulates easier to remove than pieces of the solid rock itself?

Then, can somebody clarify the physics for me- how far away can the target be from the energy source of the gyro-tron?

I really don't love being negative all the time, but this project is going nowhere.

Boring rock in this way is a permanent "we're 5-10 years away research project."

They've coupled a never ending research project with the idea of "hey there's already some power lines here" which is the smallest of efficiency gains in the big picture.

Anyone else find it weird that there have been a flood of MIT links on the front page the past few days?

TANSTAAFL... If we tap the energy from the molten core, part of the system that both drives/stabilizes the rotation of the planet, and provides the magnet generating our solar radiation shield (van allen belts), then I think we can expect eventually to face rotation/stabilization degradation.

Of course, eventually might be a million years from now. I remember climate change deniers saying that climate change might produce a visible effect by 2400, and by then we could fix it. Now look where we are with that.

There's also fracking. To tap the core we probably need to do deep drilling, with a lot of the problems that drilling for oil or fracking cause, except possibly magnified because of the depths we're talking about.

It is much easier, and safer, to tap solar energy. If we pour research into solar efficiency and house-scale batteries, we could provide all of the electricity needed for U.S. homes and have enough to sell to Canada and Mexico with only 16k sq miles (the size of Nellis AFB).

"A square mile, 5,280 feet times 5,280 feet equals 27,878,400 square feet. Divided by 15 sq.ft. per module, we can fit 1,858,560 modules per square mile. At 0.6266 kilowatt-hours per module per day, our square mile will deliver 1,164,574 kWh per day on average, or 425,069,510 kWh per year. Back to our goal of 4,000,000,000,000 kWh, divided by 425,069,510 kWh per year per square mile, it looks like we need about 9,410 square miles of surface to meet the electrical needs of the U.S. That’s a square area a bit less than 100 miles on a side. This is a bit over half of the approximate 16,000 square miles currently occupied by the Nevada Test Site and the surrounding Nellis Air Force Range." [1]

[1] https://www.terrawatts.com/PV-production.html

I remember seeing bits of an old movie when I was young that used this has a plot device: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/

I have absolutely zero knowledge which would qualify me to talk about this topic. But based on what I know about our world and its ecosystems, I just can't imagine that drilling holes into earth and extracting it's heat can be a good idea when done in large scales.

I could imagine that this seems reasonably safe right now, only for us to find out that it's actually a horrible thing to do. As has happened lots of times before. This is just a gut feeling and I'm not anti or whatever, it just feels...weird to me.

No idea what the bad effects could be. Loss of internal heat, destabilization, sinkholes, loss of pressure, volcano eruptions back-firing through these holes. Admittedly, these examples sound like apocalypse movie scenarios. Which just validates my initial statement about me actually not knowing very much.

The well drilling using microwave lasers, generated using those gyrotrons, certainly sounds novel enough. It will need a R&D program to bring it up to a mature tech level.

The concept of reusing existing coal plants sounds clever.

Should we be concerned about cooling down the earth's core over the long term? I'd rather if we focus our efforts on renewables (basically anything that gets energy from sunlight - solar, wind, biomass)

What the article doesn’t address is the potential for earthquakes. I thought that was the limiting factor in a lot of deep geothermal drilling? Didn’t Iceland run into this?

Idk why this sounds like another business scientist with a lofty idea that will never materialize.

My biggest question is whether this will be the next climate crisis. There have been recent articles about how the earth's geology is cooling faster than expected. There are questions around if our planet will become a dead planet as it cools. It seems like speeding this up could be an issue, especially given how little we know.

How do they propose to remove the vaporized material from the bore hole?

I've worked in oil and gas for years. It's possible the article is missing a bunch of details, but I'm extremely dubious of their idea.

First, how do they plan to address well control? As you drill down through the Earth, you drill through many layers of rock, some of which contain oil and gas in various quantities. Since the thousands of feet of rock above is heavy, they are under a lot of pressure, and will be happy to flow out through your borehole and up to the surface if you don't take measures to keep the formation under control. If they are allowed to do that, those flammable materials can easily ignite and cause a fire big enough to destroy your entire drilling apparatus and be very difficult to put out. Note that you don't necessarily need enough oil and gas to be commercially produceable to generate a disastrously bad blowout.

Oil wells address this by filling the borehole with drilling fluid at a specific density, which produces enough pressure at the bottom of the hole to counter formation pressure. Every well is also fitted with multiple blowout preventers to seal off the well in case of a sudden pressure increase from the formation, and also allow heaver weight fluid to be circulated in to get back under control. The wells are also drilled and cased in sections, so that there is never too large of an amount of borehole uncovered that needs to be kept under control.

So given all that, exactly where is this Gyrotron going to be? If it's at the surface, how are they planning to microwave through miles of drilling fluid and have enough energy at the bottom to cut more rock? If it's at depth, how is this Gyrotron going to survive the high temperatures there? High-end electronics are much more sensitive to extreme heat than drill bits are. Especially if you're pumping ~megawatts of energy through them to actually cut rock. Speaking of, how would we even get that much electric power down there? Oil and gas has spent many billions of dollars on this and has yet to find a good solution.

Also, how are they planning to keep this whole straight and judge depth? Holes thousands of feet down don't just stay straight, you have to actively keep them straight. The oilfield has plenty of ways to do this with conventional drilling hardware, how will their Gyrotron system manage it? And we also need to transport rock cuttings / fumes to the surface fast enough to support the drilling rate, how will they do that?

I'm also wondering about fluid flowrates. If they manage to drill down far enough to get to rock hot enough, how much fluid do they need to flow in order to get enough heat energy to the surface to operate these steam turbines? How big pipes do they need up and down to flow that rate? They also need to flow slow enough at depth to pick up lots of heat, and also fast enough through the mid and shallow depths to not lose all that heat to the local formation before it gets to the surface. For that matter, what's the heat flow rate from the magma into the rock at the depth they were drilling out - how much heat power can we really extract long-term with their setup? (I see jjk166 has addressed that, and that it is another serious issue).

Don't get me wrong, geothermal is a really nice solution, and I wish all the luck in the world to anyone working on using it more. I just don't see any technology here that address the real issues with getting large-scale energy from geothermal.

Man MIT press and marketing is good.

That's nice. But there's an even easier, cleaner and even mobile source of "free" energy - plus, it's fully open-sourced (no patents, fees, limitations, etc.): https://www.KryonEngine.org

Fascinating. In the most basic of philosophies, extracting conserved energy from our planet doesn't really fix the problem. Even in the best case the unintended and unknown consequences will destroy any predictions as to how something like this plays out. But as far as band-aids go this one sounds like it could us a whole lot more time...

> This will happen quickly once we solve the immediate engineering problems of transmitting a clean beam and having it operate at a high energy density without breakdown

> [...] In five or six years, I think we’ll have a plant running if we solve these engineering problems. I’m very optimistic.

If only a few engineering problems have to be solved to make it work, then it will be ready in no time. It's not like those engineering problems are hard to solve or anything. That's why fusion works so great, cheap batteries are wide-spread and everyone has 100% effective solar-panels.