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Co-Founder of Quaise Energy - Deep Geothermal

Matt Houde on Curious Worldview - Spotify

Matt Houde On Curious Worldview - Apple

Quaise are just now on the other side of the most exciting week in their companies short history.

Just a quick reminder… Quaise are a technology company using millimeter wave energy from a gyrotron that vaporises rock and creates boreholes for accessing deep geothermal energy. They offer an alternative to costly traditional drilling methods for accessing those critically hot depths. 

It is an extremely ambitious, exciting and unique ambition - and Quaise have now proven their technology is applicable outside of theoretical and controlled lab conditions. They have successfully dug to a depth of 100m with their technology at a sight just down the road from Joe Rogan outside of Austin, Texas - and therefore, move one step closer to realising their goal for adding electrons at scale to the grid.

Matt Houde is the Co-Founder of Quaise. This is the second time he's joined me on the podcast. In this interview today we discussed the success of the Texas site, the business model of Quaise, serendipity in innovation, politics and finance for energy and Quaise and plenty more in between… 

Consider sharing this interview with a mate, colleague, brother, sister, whoever you think might be interested in this as well.

This is the primer for geothermal and Quaise I wrote for the beginning of the episode

…here’s a really tough question that has confounded economists, academics, energy companies and politicians for decades … how do we create more energy this year than we did last, that's cost efficient, geopolitically agnostic, and not so carbon dense that it further snowballs us towards environmental catastrophe? And furthermore, how do we produce that energy today in response to a world of increasing demand from data centres, EV’s, batteries across the board and the ballooning populations from developing countries consuming more and demanding a higher standard of living on the scale of a billion plus people. 

How do we do all this? 

While oil, gas, solar and wind aren’t going anywhere and are as important as ever, Quaise have frisbeed their hat into the ring with their own solution in tow. 

The solution being… deep geothermal. 

The case for deep geothermal, is, actually a rather simple one on the surface. There is an abundance of heat beneath our feet, always. Anywhere between a few metres, all the way to 20km’s beneath the ground you walk, right now, is hot rock, up to 300-400C. And that heat is always there, it has always been there, emanating from our planet’s core since the second Earth was formed billions of years ago and will continue to do so for billions more. 

Therefore, the deep geothermal case is rather straight forward. Drill deep wells, boil water at those depths, and use that steam to generate a turbine that adds electrons to the grid?

It’s actually such a rich proposition, and as you’ll see today’s interview, it looks like we’re only an engineering problem away from getting there. Geothermal doesn’t have the baggage weighing it down it’s competitors.

Oil and gas while principally responsible for the level of civilisation we have today, are equally responsible for our changing climate. Nuclear has the perennial problem of it’s geopolitically significant bi-product and all the bad PR from Chernobyl and the rest. And even solar and wind, you don’t need to look far to to see that even they get a bad wrap. 

But deep geothermal is, so far at least, without these plaguing caveats. It could may well be the cleanest, most discrete, powerful energy at our disposal. 

The question is however, do we have the tech to enable it?

The core problem is digging to depths where the rock is so hot that our traditional drilling technologies just can’t do it without the economics completely falling apart. 

Matt gives a good example in this interview of a 11km well recently dug in China, that took 50% of the time getting to 10kms, then 50% of the time, just going one kilometre more. 

And if the critically hot rock is at that 15 or 20 kilometre depth, then we need to innovate a better way to dig down whereby the economics come up green, rather than red. 

And that’s where Quaise, and Matt Houde enter the discussion. 

Quaise are a sci-fi company in all the best ways. They do not cut away rock with a drill bit. They instead, zap away rock, a little bit a time, thereby avoiding the costly and time consuming process of churning through hard rock and replacing loads of expensive drill bits. 

However! While it all sounds sci-fi, this isn’t some purely theoretical idea that falls to bits as soon as it’s exposed to the real world. 

Just last week, Quaise, of which Matt is a Co-Founder, successfully applied this technology to a depth of 100m at a real world sight in Texas. 

And although it’s not 20km, just think about how long 100 metres is. This is an astounding achievement, and proves that the technology is applicable in the real world. Thereby creating a tremendous amount of excitement, optimism, and in my case, just raw bullishness that Quaise may well go onto prove their thesis.

That with this technology, you can go, for all intents and purposes, anywhere in the world. Drill a whole deep enough, attach some discrete infrastructure to the surface, and add electrons at scale to the grid. 

This is huge for the energy transition, but as well consequential geopolitically.