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Under this bolted down cover lies one of earth's most ambitious projects. A hole barely wide enough to squeeze your head into. This is the deepest hole ever dug on earth. The Kola Superdeep borehole. A 12 kilometre deep hole in the ground that took two decades to drill and in the process unearthed some unexpected scientific discoveries. Drilling this deep into the earth is not done often, and for good reason. We simply do not have the technologies to do it quickly, but the treasures that lay below the surface have encouraged engineering start ups to find
a new way to drill even further, and if they succeed it could help humans transition to renewable technologies without building new power plants. One company, Quaise Energy, is looking to adapt a technology developed for nuclear fusion reactors to solve the challenges of digging holes this deep. They make some big claims, so I wanted to visit their facility in Houston, Texas to see the technology in action for myself. So what are those treasures? Deep within the earth fission reactions generate immense
quantities of heat. The Earth's core is 6000 degrees celsius, and just 0.1 percent of the planet's heat content could supply all our energy needs for 2 million years. However, accessing that heat is not easy. Some countries, like Iceland, have it lucky with that geothermal energy reaching close to the surface. So close that geysers of boiling water erupt the ground. Areas like this are rare, which is why geothermal energy accounts for a tiny fraction of the world's energy supply. We have a safe fission reactor under our feet, but we simply can't access it easily.
The deeper you go, the hotter it gets. With temperatures increasing roughly 30 degrees per kilometer. [REF] And the hotter the temperature, the more energy we can extract. Especially if we can create supercritical steam. Steam turns into supercritical steam when it reaches a temperature of roughly 374 degrees celsius and a pressure of 22 mega pascals. Supercritical steam has some special characteristics that make it highly efficient at driving a steam turbine. The problem is, reaching the depths where supercritical steam can be
created is basically impossible in most locations with current drilling techniques, because the cost of drilling increases exponentially with depth. Once a geothermal power plant is up and running, its operating costs are very low. But the issue is the capital cost of creating the plant, most of the cost, around 50%, comes from the drilling process, and that's for relatively shallow drilling depths. To create a geothermal power well you need to drill at least two bore holes. Drilling the two bore holes necessary for geothermal wells to a distance of 3 km's would cost around 6 million dollars, but doubling that bore hole
depth to 6 kilometers would cost 27 million dollars. Here's why. [REF] The extreme conditions as you drill deeper makes operations extremely hostile to the machinery. The heat damages drill bits and the rocks become tougher to drill through too, so progress begins to slow and drill bits begin to break more frequently. And replacing the drill bits gets harder the deeper you drill too. To replace a drill bit located at the very bottom of a kilometers deep bore hole with stacks of drill pipe above it, requires the entire stack to be pulled up. The longer the stack, the longer it takes. With drilling engineers being highly skilled and in demand professionals, their time isn't cheap.
The hole also becomes more unstable as you drill deeper. Bore holes need reinforcement with steel pipes and concrete, which also becomes more difficult and costly at deeper depths. If the bore hole does collapse the entire drill stack could be trapped and require a new hole to be drilled. But what if we could drill a hole without even touching the rock face, and use that higher heat to our advantage? This is what Quaise energy is trying to do, by using extremely high power high frequency electromagnetic waves to vaporize the rock. And they want to do this using something called a gyrotron. Which sounds like a made up word,
but they are commercially available devices that are a critical technology in many fusion reactors where they are used to heat the fusion plasma to the absolutely insane temperatures needed to achieve fusion within the reactor's magnetic containment. [REF] It works by generating a beam of electrons within a vacuum. The electrons are accelerated and passed through an extremely powerful magnetic field. Here the electrons begin rotating around magnetic field lines, and with the correct magnetic strength, this rotation can reach a resonance mode that allows the electrons to emit vast quantities of electromagnetic radiation.
It works on similar principles as lasers, but instead of producing visible light it produces higher frequency microwaves. Giving it the name maser. [REF] This can then be piped out of the gyrotron through wave guides and directed where it's needed. The plan here is to drill using conventional methods until the conditions make progress too slow and expensive. For this reason a good portion of Quaise's focus is integrating this technology into existing drilling equipment, so existing skill sets and existing technologies can be used, the drill stack will simply be replaced with the waveguide, which are essentially just hollow metal pipes.
The high power millimeter waves are transported to the rock face with the waveguide where it first melts and then vaporizes the rock. A nitrogen purge gas is continually fed down the tube to extract the vaporized rock, but with careful control of some parameters we can just melt some of the rock which can help form a casing of melted obsidian like material. Something we saw in Quaise's bin of test articles. This all sounds extremely sci-fi and a little far fetched, so I wanted to get a look at the drilling process first hand. This is real time footage. Keep in mind here that the rock
is being vaporised. Not melted. Vaporized. The once solid rock is being converted into a gas. This vaporized rock is then blown away by the purge gas. The test room this took place in was covered in strands of what looked like glass fibre. These fibres were being formed by the vaporized rock, and I am very glad I was wearing a mask while in that room. To this requires an incredible amount of energy being directed into a small area, and I wanted to get a look at the machine responsible, hidden inside this shipping container. Here I
asked what the difference was between their gyrotron and those used in the fusion industry. The difference between the gyrotron that's used in the fusion industry and our industry is really we're using the gyrotron as a source of heat. We really want to maximize that. And we really don't need the precise, you know, band that's actually operating in, whereas fusion is very precise to hit the Tokamak to hit the plasma, we basically have a little bit looser requirements and so allows us to have more flexibility on the design of the gyrotron for our future application. Brian and with scaling this up to dig wider holes. That was the main reason you wanted the wider hole?
Henry Yeah, that's right. We want you to be able to go deeper and bigger holes in this regard, and that's why you need to go to the higher gyrotron power. Brian Do you think the one megawatt version is as wide, like for. Henry Yeah. So to put it in perspective, we're using a hundred kilowatts gyrotron to make a four inch hole and at a decent, what we call rate of penetration. We actually are going ten times more in terms of power now with a one megawatt gyrotron, but only doubling the diameter in this regard. So four times time the area by going from four inch to eight inch, but we used ten times more power. So
we think we have enough margin there to make a larger hole with the one megawatt gyrotron Okay. And how quickly do you actually bore the holes based on your test articles so far? Like how long do you expect to be drawing one megawatt of power for these holes? Well, for the reference. So this one here is making a four inch hole in about one meter an hour. We want to be able to make an equivalent rate of penetration one meter an hour for an eight half inch hole. Okay. So basically one megawatt hour per meter. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So we don't need to aim to go extremely fast. You know, we're
going to work on that. But the reality is this is something that nobody can deal with, even current technology. So even going to one meter an hour is already much faster than current technology can. By the time you consider the actual regular drill bit drilling and wearing down and then pulling out of the hole, replacing that bit several days and going back in and all that time up, you're actually effective ROP is really much slower than what we could do because, you know, constantly or consistently because we actually don't have a need to replace any part, we basically continuously drilling.
So our effective ROP is actually pretty fast compared to conventional, where you actually have the trip in and out. What does that acronym mean? Rate of penetration. So this is how we gauge how efficient your operation is. Your rate of penetration, which is how fast are you actually drilling. And because drilling time is money spent on the rig and personnel in that regard So you want to minimize you want to maximize that drilling time so that you minimize the cost, the operational costs at the rig in that regard.
Is that your main limiting factor right now is just like the rate of penetration of. Yeah, I think that we want to maximize that is probably is the main requirement for us, is to maximize. We don't want to spend you know, more than several hundred, we don't wanna spend hundreds of days drilling. We want to spend about 100 days of drilling this type of well. So we don't want to spend years drilling this well. It doesn't become economical. So it's all about how to make it more economical from a journey point of view.
This was eye opening to the challenges facing Quaise. 1 megawatt hour of electricity costs anywhere between 50 to 100 dollars. Quaise wants to achieve a rate of penetration of 1 metre per hour with a 1 megawatt gyrotron making an 8 inch hole. At that rate it would take 41 days of constant drilling and 1000 megawatt hours to create a 1 kilometre hole At a price of lets say 75 dollars per megawatt, this would cost 75,000 dollars in electricity alone. This actually sounds pretty reasonable, but again this is their stated goal, not what they are currently doing. But the technology clearly works.
A gyrotron absolutely can drill at a reasonable rate. The real question is can it do it in real world conditions at a reasonable cost. Up to the date of filming Quaise hadn't stated field trials, and were largely focusing on figuring out the science of drilling using this technique. In the lab they have been testing different rocks, different purge gas rates, different distance of the waveguide from the rock face. The lab is littered with these test samples. So what you see is a variety of different samples that we've tested and is really testing out the recipe to make a very good hole and make a very long hole.
And you can see there's a bunch of different shapes of it. And you see some that are just glassy looking and then some of them are bigger holes in the other. This is us playing with the different parameters of do we see in the microwave as what we call CW, meaning just full on, or do we pulse it or do we send pulsed gas in different ways? High volume, Low volume. Do we stand off from the launcher to the rock at certain distance? So this is all playing with different parameters and you're getting different results from it. So this is just a graveyard of different rock types. And also different parameters that
we've tested. So we have now a recipe that we plan to take to the feel and the stack of rock. There is the evidence in those two rock that you guys saw there or the evidence or the final recipe that we've come up with to take it to the field to make this four inch hole. Does that change with the type of rock that you're drilling into as well? It tweaks a little bit. What we found is basalt actually is is a very homogenous and actually will allow us to drill faster. But it's the same. We have the now a recipe where we can actually have the same stand off, same amount of gas and the benefit of rocks a little bit softer like basalt allows
us to go faster whereas granite has a little bit more quartz in it. So yes, we spend a little more time melting it and getting it ready to be able to extract out the hole. Is that is driven by the melting point of the rock surprisingly basalt and granite has very similar melting point which is about 15 t 1200 1500 degrees C but it's, it's the, the, the granite that has a lot more quartz in and you can see the quartz in the white minerals inside there. That has a much different has more reflectivity and they also has more it's a has a higher hardness and that requires a little bit more heat to be able to warm microwave,
to be able to get that to the melting point to the vaporization point. So that's really that's driving that a lower RPM than it is something that is more homogenous. Even this, even though this is granite, is more homogeneous than what we call the pink sunset type of rock that has very big chunks of quartz in it, whereas this is very uniform quartz inside here. And basalt doesn't even have that, and it makes it easier to even drill into. So yes, the recipe or the type of rock will dictate how fast we go. But we think we have a recipe that is very insensitive to the parameters. It's just a matter then, being able to drill faster depending on the type of rock you into.
Learning that higher quartz content affects drilling rates because it reflects the millimeter waves is pretty fascinating, and there are likely a whole lot more unforeseen circumstances in the real world that will raise the energy and drilling time for these bore holes. Water will be this technology's worst enemy. If water keeps infiltrating the hole it would draw a huge portion of gyrotron's energy as it boils. Some methods of dealing with this have been suggested. One method proposed is to feed material to the drill site that could be melted with the gyrotron, and this molten material would then flow and fill entry points for water
in the rock. But this itself sounds like it would be very time consuming and imprecise. These are the types of things laboratory testing just can't give us answers to. Quaise needs to start drilling in the field and that's exactly what they plan to do this year in Marble Falls, Texas. Getting to that point is an achievement in itself. Technologies like this frequently never leave the lab, and for good reason. Making high tech equipment like this operate, reliably, in harsh construction site conditions is a challenge.
Equipment needs to be containerized to be transportable. It needs to be rugged to resist the stress of transportation on rough roads. And a gyrotron needs a high voltage power supply. Their gyrotron needs 50000 volts dc, which the grid cannot provide. With the plugs in your home providing just 120 volts and even industrial supplies being just 480 volts. So Quaise had this transportable temperature controlled high voltage power supply custom built in Switzerland. And they also needed transportable nitrogen generators and pressurized containers to provide the purge gas. They also need to containerize their
gyrotron and protect it from the elements, and incorporate it into a conventional drilling rig. This is just one of those things with growing a start up. A proof of concept can cost millions to develop. A commercial 1 megawatt gyrotron alone costs 1 million. But getting that proof of concept out into the field and working outside of perfect lab conditions is another challenge all together. Thankfully Quaise has a good amount of funding. Raising 91 million over 5 rounds since 2020. But it's time for them to prove this can work in the real world.
Quaise began their first outdoor drilling tests this month, and there is plenty left to prove. It's clear that this technology is capable of drilling. But that doesn't matter if requires an ungodly amount of gigawatt hours of energy to operate. There is one very simple metric an energy company needs to optimize for. For a source of electricity to succeed it needs to out compete other sources of electricity on cost. It's price per kilowatt has to be cheaper. We can estimate that with something called the levelized cost of electricity. Levelized cost of electricity is calculated by dividing the initial capital costs and the total lifespan oper ating costs, by the
total energy generated. On shore wind energy is currently the cheapest form of electricity coming in at a price as low as 3 cent a kilowatt hour or 30 dollars a Megawatt hour. [REF] Quaise actually have an interactive levelized cost of electricity map on their website which gives an estimate based on how deep they need to drill by location. In Marble Falls, where they are drilling now the cost is estimated around 115 dollars per megawatt hour. Which is about in line with Nuclear fission, and cost of electricity is the main reason nuclear power is falling out of favour right now. But in other locations it can get as low as 68 dollars per megawatt,
which is starting to sound more competitive, but these are Quaise's own numbers. Their final product could easily end up costing more. As with all geothermal plants, nearly all costs arise from initial capital investment costs. A gyrotron itself costs about 1.1 million dollar. For a 7 kilometre deep borehole, they expect the waveguides, which are essentially hollow pipes, to cost 2.3 million dollars. The rig structure to cost 8 million. Compressors and pumps to cool and remove vaporized rock to cost 7.5 million dollar. Bringing the capital cost to 19 million dollars. [REF]
To drill a 7 kilometre bore hole the electricity cost, under the ideal the conditions that Henry shared earlier, would cost 525,000 dollars in electricity costs for the Gyrotron alone. We aren't going to know if this number is realistic until they start drilling. Likewise much of Quaise's vision depends on that obsidian like casing working to reinforce holes and reducing the risk of borehole collapse, but that's something that can only be proved in field testing. But if Quaise can reduce the cost of drilling geothermal wells they could trigger a radical acceleration of our transition away from fossil fuels.
Especially when we can adapt former fossil fuel power plants by drilling down for a new source of heat. Drilling directly next to the power plant and bringing supercritical steam from the bowels of the earth to keep the turbines running. That is a compelling vision, if the technology works, and it sounds like we will have some answers to that in the very near future. Companies like this depend on computer aided design software. I learned at least 4 different design programs while working in different companies. All of them are insanely expensive and difficult to manage.
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