Despite its ability to deliver ample carbon-free energy, the potential of geothermal — both conventional and enhanced — is limited by the number of drilling sites close enough to the earth’s surface.
But a few pioneering companies have landed on a potential solution: dig way deeper.
In this episode, Shayle speaks with Carlos Araque, the founder of Quaise Energy. The company has developed millimeter-wave drills to vaporize rock, allowing them to dig up to twelve miles underground in search of water around 800 degrees Fahrenheit. That super hot and “supercritical” water packs a huge punch: ten times more energy density than traditional geothermal.
Shayle and Carlos explore a range of topics, including:
- Why 800 degree water is the “ideal” temperature for deep geothermal
- How “activating” permeability in deep rock differs from traditional fracking
- The state of Quaise’s Oregon project pilot, including their goal of a commercial-grade flow test by the end of 2026
- How the LCOE of super hot geothermal compares to traditional baseload energy sources
Resources
- Catalyst: How geothermal gets built
- Open Circuit: Is this geothermal’s breakout moment?
- Latitude Media: Armed with $115 million, geothermal startup Zanskar gets ready to build
- Green Blueprint: Sage Geosystems’ bet on geothermal energy storage
- Latitude Media: Fervo’s Tim Latimer is ‘bullish’ on DOE funding for geothermal
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
Catalyst is brought to you by Uplight. Uplight activates energy customers and their connected devices to generate, shift, and save energy—improving grid resilience and energy affordability while accelerating decarbonization. Learn how Uplight is helping utilities unlock flexible load at scale at uplight.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate, energy, and infrastructure leaders. If you’re a startup, investor, or global corporation that’s looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group’s team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.
Transcript
Shayle Kann: Coming up a slightly deep dive into extremely deep geothermal.
I’m Shayle Kann. I lead the early stage venture strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. So the promise is pretty simple, geothermal, anywhere. Just to unpack that a bit, there is for good reason, a lot of excitement about geothermal power right now.
The list of clean baseload power generation sources is sadly pretty short. And as far as proven technologies go, sorry. Wave power is really just hydro, nuclear and geothermal, and each of those three in my mind has a core limitation For hydro, the best resource is mostly tapped in at least much of the west.
For nuclear, it’s a question of cost and time to market, and for geothermal. It’s the geological boundaries. You need a lot of heat close to the surface for traditional geothermal, for enhanced geothermal systems. EGS, those rules are relaxed a bit, but realistically, we’re still talking about a swath of the west in the United States, for example.
But go deep enough and there’s enough heat everywhere. Literally. So the questions are, can you drill deep enough and more importantly, hot enough, can you extract that heat and will it be cheap?
Carlos Araque thinks the answer will be yes, yes, yes. He’s the CEO of Quaise, which is a startup going after super hot geothermal. Let’s hear his vision.
Carlos. Welcome.
Carlos Araque: Thank you. Good to be here.
Shayle Kann: All right. So I want to start by having you describe to me how traditional geothermal, like traditional hydrothermal, geothermal works, so that we can contrast that to the type of thing that you’re going after, which is super deep, super hot. So if I’m, if I’m doing like a traditional hydrothermal, geothermal system, the types of things that, you know, we were building in the seventies and eighties and are building some of, now again today, how deep am I drilling and how hot is the rock that I’m looking for.
Carlos Araque: For traditional hydrothermal, not, not very deep at all. You’re going maybe a mile at most, and, and you’re getting as hot as what the water that’s down there gets you. It’s usually sub boiling. It’s hard to get to boiling temperatures. You’re talking about 200 degrees Fahrenheit and less. hydrothermal requires that water to be in there.
So that’s a key characteristic we’re gonna be talking about today. The modern geothermal doesn’t require that you’ll bring your own water.
Shayle Kann: Okay. But so we’re getting, we’re getting temperatures in the low hundreds of degrees fahrenheit and depths in the mid thousands of feet basically is the, is kind of like where we’ve traditionally developed geothermal.
Carlos Araque: Yeah, that is correct. Those are very near surface systems. They’re even shallower than what oil and gas would require.
Shayle Kann: Okay. And so the whole point of this is that like that those systems exist and that’s why we have geothermal power today and we can probably develop a lot more geothermal power if we could just find where those systems exist more. But they are geographically limited. You do need that heat to be pretty close to the surface, and you need some additional characteristics like permeability as well.
And that’s what has kept. Geothermal limited geographically to specific areas kind of all over the world. Let’s contrast that then. So when you think about the type of thing you are interested in, what type of depth and temperature should I be thinking about?
Carlos Araque: So, so the right way to think about this is to think about temperature. Temperature is the target. We pick roughly 800 degrees Fahrenheit. For a very clear reason. It’s physics. If you are going to use water to extract heat from the subsurface, that is the ideal temperature, 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything above that diminishing returns, anything below that, you’re leaving too much opportunity on the table.
So we’re going after that temperature. That is the target. And the question then is, how deep is that? Well, it depends where you are in some places. Not very deep at all. You can go maybe three miles, which is consistent with oil and gas drilling depths, and you’re there. But in other places you have to go three, maybe four times as deep as that to get to those temperatures.
So that’s the range. Always looking for 800 Fahrenheit, and you’ll find it anywhere between three miles to 12 miles deep depending on where you are in the world.
Shayle Kann: Okay, so, and you just mentioned the right comparison here. So in traditional geothermal, we’re going nowhere near that deep in oil and gas. You can go to the kinda lower end of those depths. So talk to me about like, how deep do we drill for oil and gas right now? And if you think about that as compared to the shallower version, the places where you get 800 degrees Fahrenheit at three mile depth or something like that, how does that compare to what we do in oil and gas?
Carlos Araque: Yeah, so oil and gas systems are not that limited. They are temperature limited. You will find, people drilling with mechanical drilling systems all the way down to eight miles, nine miles, pushing really out there, but not hot, right? So the, the gap is not depth. The gap is heat is how hot you can drill, and that’s where you will start seeing fundamental differences.
If I try to answer this irrespective, irrespective of temperature, I would tell you that oil and gas systems can already drill to the vast majority of depths that these, that, that we’re talking about her, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 miles under the earth. But when you add the temperature, which is really the target we’re going for.
Then you see a massive gap. To put it bluntly, oil and gas mostly happens at two to three miles deep. It’s rare to find it below that because it’s, it starts to get too hot. And here we’re talking about that being the beginning of the geothermal frontier and locking. So, so the end of one is the beginning of the other one.
Shayle Kann: Geographically, you know, if you’re going eight or nine miles deep or something like that, you kind of, I think, tell me, you get that amount, you get that heat, that 800 degrees or something in that range kind of everywhere. But, but it’d be better to start where it’s not quite that deep. So where geographically do you tend to get it?
I mean, I’m sure this is different all over the world, but talk to me about like what are the geologies and maybe within the US where can you find 800 degrees at like three miles.
Carlos Araque: Yeah, it’s usually the ring of fire, so anywhere in the Pacific, side of the country, and all of the Pacific of, of South America as well. So the ring of fire wrapping from America to North America, to Alaska, to Japan, to Indonesia, to Philippines, all the way down to New Zealand. That’s a typical place where you’ll find those, and that’s billions of people.
So it’s not a small market by any means. You can also find it in the, in the Atlantic Ridge. So Iceland, for example. You don’t need to go anywhere close to those steps to get to those temperatures. Kenya, in short, everywhere where you have geothermal today is very likely one of those places where you’ll find the 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
At three miles. Closer to three miles, then closer to 12 miles.
Shayle Kann: I guess we should maybe be explicit about why getting to 800 degrees Fahrenheit is beneficial. Can you just do a quick comparison to like how much power you could extract from a well at, if it is an 800 degree, well, versus a 200 degree? Well.
Carlos Araque: Yeah, we’re talking about 10 times the power. So the Icelandic were the first ones to talk about these at length. It has to do with physics. It has to do with the thermo physical properties of water, basically higher densities, lower viscosities. It has to do. With the thermodynamic conversion efficiencies between the heat and electricity.
So at the end of the day, the same well bore, let’s call it eight inch in diameter, very typical size. It will transfer maybe one to 10 megawatts electric equivalent if it’s flowing at 200 degrees Fahrenheit and will transfer. 10 times that, if it’s flowing at 800 degrees Fahrenheit. So, in Fahrenheit terms, two times the temperature, three, four times the temperature, but 10 times the power.
So that’s the calculus we’re trying to unlock. And if you go hotter than that, it actually doesn’t help you. So if you go to a thousand Fahrenheit, 2000 Fahrenheit, it actually works against yourself. 800 really is the gold delone for that super critical property of water. And you’re talking about a 10 x.
Shayle Kann: So the trade is basically you’re gonna spend more to drill a well. Unquestionably, you’re going deeper, and as we’re gonna talk about, you need. Different materials and a different kind of system if you’re gonna go really, really deep because of the, because dealing with the temperature. Exactly. So apples to apples, you’re gonna have a more expensive Well, but you’re gonna get 10 x more power outta that.
Well, and so you could have, your budget is basically. You know, to a first order, 10 x higher drilling costs that you can afford in order for that to be a worthwhile trade. You also get the benefit of this different geography, right? Like there’s places where you can get 800 degrees at, uh, five miles, but you’re not gonna be able to do traditional hydrothermal anyway, just ’cause you don’t have enough heat near the surface.
So that’s kind of the interesting trade here. I guess the other thing we should talk about though is, is permeability, right? Like if you’re doing traditional geothermal. Exploration. You’re trying to find a place that does have heat near the surface and also has sufficient permeability, is how does that look at these greater depths?
Carlos Araque: Yeah, so in general, permeability decreases as you go deeper, you have more let static pressures and, that’s going to work against you, however. The, the crust of the earth is critically fractured. This has been shown. So what that means is that there’s already an inherent fracture crust at large, and when you start putting cold fluids in an injector, well the density of those colder fluids versus the lower density of the poor pressure fluids will actually open that up.
I did a very early in my days in Kuze and coming from oil and gas, I did a little bit of a literature search on. Something called lost circulation events. In oil and gas, it basically means you’re losing your drilling muds. And you see it in the literature when you exceed a certain depth temperature threshold when you’re going into the, a little bit too deep, a little bit too hot.
Well, bo in oil and gas, you have no circulation events. In other words. You fracture, you activate the permeability in the bro that’s already there. So we believe that, in the geothermal, we’re going for this hotter, deeper kind, activating that permeability. It’s going to be, favored by physics, by differential density of fluids.
But this is an EGS system. We’re not talking about having permeability in there. It’s, if it’s there, it’s there, it’s closed. How we’re talking about activating that permeability through fluid flow. But this is a drastically different process than what you would see in fracturing for oil and gas that requires very high pressure surface pumping, for very long timeframes.
Shayle Kann: So if I can try to repeat that to make sure I understand it. Expectation is in the, the places you’re gonna be drilling, there will be low permeability, so you will need to fracture. We don’t currently frack at those depths because we don’t drill to those depths really in oil and gas. But you believe that because of the fundamental physics, it will actually be easier to frack, essentially.
’cause you’re gonna, you’re basically gonna inject drilling muds and those are gonna open up a fracture network just because of how the rock works. Do we have, like do we, do we have, have, has anyone done that at that depth ever?
Carlos Araque: So we don’t access these depths at these temperatures, right? Any, any hole that’s sleeping in the world is not hot. So this effect doesn’t quite manifest like cola in Russia. The KTB in Germany, they’re, they’re cold. They’re, they’re barely. They have the temperature that we need it to be. So the answer is no.
Nobody’s ever done it. The closest we’ve done to that is in the lab. EPFL has been publishing a very interesting work, the Japanese as well, showing these effects. But, but that’s correct. The physics tells you on the lab experiments tell you that the, the density of the colder fluids play a disproportionate role in fracture, initiation, and propagation at these temperature depth combinations.
Now the first project, the one we’re doing in Oregon will be the beginning of showing those effects. I think we’re gonna be the first people in the world that actually show and start pointing the way to, that following from lab results. Yeah.
Shayle Kann: So I guess if you think about at the high level, there’s an obvious reason to do this. Right. You, you, if you can successfully drill to these depths and these temperatures, the resources enormous and ubiquitous, depending on how deep you get. And so it’s super attractive. Why hasn’t it been done?
There are a bunch of technical challenges. So if we think about the, the kind of big technical challenges, I think I’m, I’m pick, I’m picking up two right now and I want you to tell me if there are others that I’m not thinking of. One is. How do you drill this, right? As you pointed out, the oil and gas drilling systems that we’ve developed are not designed to go to these temperatures, even if they are designed to go to these depths.
And then two is what we’re talking about right now, which is, okay. Now you have to kind of, I don’t want to overstate it, but like invent a new form of fracking essentially, that you can do at these great depths and these great temperatures, and then ensure that that delivers sufficient permeability and that your decline curve is.
Acceptable and so on. Do I have those two technical risks right at the high level and then are the other major challenges that I’m not thinking of?
Carlos Araque: Yeah, I think those two encapsulate the core of what are the gates that you need to go through to prove that this can be done at scale. The drilling by far outweighs the fracturing. The fracturing does happen in nature. We see this in nature every time. Hydrothermal vent or mine forms. This is the process by which it does so.
So there’s evidence in the geological record that the fracturing part has precedent. There’s no evidence whatsoever in the geological record, of course, that you can actually drill these things mechanically from the surface. That’s a unique thing. So I would, I would say that if you can access these temperatures regardless of depth, you’ve initiated a journey for human creativity in an industry to actually.
Conquer that, that frontier, that geological frontier. And as you correctly pointed, I think the price that we gain by doing so is enormous. It’s unlike any other energy source out there. It dwarves everything else combined, so That’s right. There’s a lot of engineering between here and there, but engineering is not physics or fundamental science are things that can, can get unlocked one step at a time, starting with those shallow air systems and progressing.
Sequentially to the deeper systems. We’re not gonna develop a deep system on day one because that’s unnecessarily hard. We’re gonna develop the shallow systems on day one and progress from there.
Shayle Kann: Apart from just the drilling, I guess this is part of the drilling challenge, but, all the equipment and the materials that we put down whole, all the stuff that is built for the oil and gas industry, like how much of that stuff, the casing, the wire line logging equipment, like all these things that we built up over years, decades in oil and gas, how much of that has to be replaced when you’re getting to those kinds of temperatures?
A wholesale replacement of the full system, or is it just a small set of things that are not tolerant to that kind of heat?
Carlos Araque: I think they are, they are incremental evolution. So, so the big gaps have already been solved for these shallower systems, you know, and I think that’s important. If we talk about shallower. Super hot rock systems versus deep, super hot rock systems. The gaps –
Shayle Kann: – shallower, you mean the like three mile type of
Carlos Araque: – yeah, the three mile, four mile, maybe even five mile.
And we call those tier one. We’ve created our own language around that, just to differentiate that the deep ones are the 12 miles, the 11 miles, those, those are drastically different problems and engineering challenges. So talking about the shallow ones. It’s incremental improvements. There’s a lot of precedence already in oil and gas.
There’s something in oil and gas stock called SAG D, STEAM assisted gravity drainage, which injects steams steam at temperatures up to 600 degrees Fahrenheit to. To mobilize very heavy oils and produce them. So there’s a whole array of techniques, materials, tools that have been developed for that market in oil and gas that provide evolutionary pathways for doing these super hot rock geothermal cements.
You need cements that cure at higher temperatures. There’s providers that provide that. You need to rely on non elastomeric solutions, so no rubber in that hull ’cause everything’s gonna flow. Those already exist and steels are quite resistant even at these temperatures. You know, we make power plants that operate at much higher temperatures.
So, so these, these issues do not intimidate or prevent us from doing these things. Now, as you start going into deeper systems, then other gaps open up, but that’s why you need to create an industrial momentum. A market for the providers of the world to innovate in that space. With electronics, it’s usually your hard limitation.
Electronics don’t survive to much higher temperatures than 200 degrees Celsius or 400 Fahrenheit, but you can circulate mods or liquids through the system to keep them cold, what they do, their jobs. So again, a lot of things that you can do to make these things actionable. Doable today for the shallow systems, not for the deep systems.
Shayle Kann: Even at what you’re calling the shallow systems. I guess one question I have one, one challenge I imagine that you face as a startup going after this is that iteration is very expensive, right? Like a single well is gonna be tens of million to get to that depth. It’s gonna be tens of millions of dollars.
That’s sort of normal. If you’re an oil and gas and you’re doing offshore or whatever, you know, you could spend $50 million on a single. Well, that’s part of your capital budget, but it’s obviously tricky as a, as a startup. So I presume your solution to that is a combination of we’re just gonna need a lot of money, but also do as much learning as you can before you have to drill all the way down to a three or four mile depth.
How much can you learn and prove. Without going to that depth versus how much are you just gonna have to drill that deep to get there?
Carlos Araque: The, these things are already drilled, right? So the place we picked for our first project already has holes drilled to the right temperature depth combinations. So that is the key. The key is your first project, your first attempt. Cannot represent technical gaps ’cause you’re gonna run outta money and you’re not gonna be able to raise the tens of millions of dollars that you need.
So we’ve already done that. We’ve picked a location with enough precedent and we’ve picked a team with enough, understanding of that location to convince enough take care of power that we can build under those conditions. So we’re already getting into market, in that location with a real take or pay.
PPA. Because we know that we can point to all of the solutions with precedent,
Shayle Kann: Who drilled a previous well to that temperature depth combination and why?
Carlos Araque: in that particular location. Neighbors. Neighbors is our drilling partner, right? So another reason why we’re working with them, these temperature depth, so these shallow super hot rock whales are, have precedent. Going all the way back to the seventies, humans have actually pushed tools to these extremes successfully.
What nobody has ever done is to actually build a full commercial grade enhanced geothermal system out of them. So we’re basically picking precedent from everywhere to build a first commercial EGS system that’s super hot rock. Now, that wouldn’t work in a deeper system, but that works in a shallow system.
To make it work in a deeper system, you need to close those gaps. And that’s where our drilling technology and many of the other things we’re doing in the background come into play. But you start, you get into your first commercial success with as much precedent as possible so that you can actually navigate those 10 million to a hundred million dollars gaps that is going to take you to do so.
Shayle Kann: So, but wait, so, neighbors in this case, which is, you know, the company doing the drilling, they drilled in, in this place in Oregon where you guys are starting, they drilled a well to this depth and temperature combination in the, in the interest of doing geothermal and, but didn’t ever, never completed a power plant with it because.
Presumably it didn’t work in some way or another. Like what, what stopped them?
Carlos Araque: Yeah, so back then, whoever was in charge of the development, and it wasn’t neighbors. Neighbors is a drilling provider. So the developer back then and, and going back to the eighties and nineties at this particular location in Oregon, they were looking for hydrothermal systems. So they didn’t find them.
Therefore they didn’t proceed by shifting from hydrothermal to EGS, you open up the pathway now, so again, you’re, you’re
Shayle Kann: find the permeability they wanted, they, they abandoned it. But your, your hope is that you’ll be able to open up that permeability.
Carlos Araque: Correct, and, and just like that location, I can point to more than 50 wells drilling in the world by people looking for super hot hydrothermal systems that are going to be in the three to four mile range and are going to be in the 600 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of them are actually getting very close to a thousand Fahrenheit, so again, precedent all over the place.
It’s the only way for a startup. To grab those precedents, learn from them, pull the right people, and build that first commercial project, get itself into business, and keep expanding from there.
Shayle Kann: Well, it’s interesting ’cause you’d before described among the two key technical challenges, drilling to that depth and temperature and, and fracking essentially different version of fracking. But nonetheless. You described the harder challenges, the drilling one, but it actually sounds like in these shallow, super hot systems, the drilling is not the problem that has been proven.
People have done it 50 times, as you said, and that means the remaining technical challenge is getting the fracture network built.
Carlos Araque: That is correct for those, for those shallow locations. Absolutely. Right? Yes. So you’re one step away from commercial success. And we’re actually well underway in overcoming that commercial, that technical challenge to get that commercial success. You’re right.
Shayle Kann: Can you walk me through, you know, I realize there’s a long-term version of the economics here where you can get remarkably cheap power. In theory, again, like the bulk of your cost or maybe what is it, 50% of your cost in a traditional hydrothermal system is just the drilling cost. Something like that.
’cause you have all this above ground infrastructure too. But you’re cutting that cost effectively by, by 10 x at least relative to the denominator of power produced. So what does it look like in your context with the new materials you need, with the type of drilling that you’re doing and the speed of that drilling with the fracture network, you’re gonna have to open up.
Walk me through how to think about the unit economics.
Carlos Araque: Yeah. So, so you’re correct. So normally in, in regular geothermal, you think of the unit economics as 50 50, very roughly speaking, it’s about 50% drilling costs, 50% power plant surface costs. With the super hot rock kind that changes, significantly because, your, your LCOE talking about LCOE, you’re not working on the cost side of the equation.
You’re working on the revenue side of the equation preferentially by accessing hotter temperatures, access, getting more power output per well or per power plant, you’re actually working on the revenue side of the equation to lower the SCOE. So for us, the drilling cost will be. In the 20 to 30% of the LCOE, the higher outputs will be a big part of bringing those lcoe down.
And we see a hundred dollars per megawatt hour at the meter no matter where you’re in the world. Now, that includes the shallow and the deep systems. If you look specifically at the shallow systems, you’re talking about sub $50 per megawatt hours. Because you, they’re not quite as expensive to build you, you’re not drilling as much, you’re not putting as much piping in the ground.
They’re shallower, but yet they still produce just as much energy as an oil and gas well. So the energy output between the deep and the shallow ones doesn’t change the cost to change. But the LCO is will range in the 50 to a hundred dollars per T hour. So that’s what we’re talking about. To me, it’s important to match the output of oil and gas, to entice oil and gas to participate at scale.
If you don’t do that. It’s always going to be a compromise.
Shayle Kann: Drilling speed is a big portion of drilling cost for anything where there’s drilling really including geothermal and you’re going deeper. So I would presume that your, to you drilling speed actually ends up being. Among the, or the most important metric probably. What do we know? You’re, you’re introducing a novel sort of drilling process, millimeter wave drilling, which you can explain what that is.
What do we know about speed and how do you compare that to what we typically see?
Carlos Araque: Yeah, so, so the, the important thing with speed is the total average speed. So it’s like the tortoise and the her, a lot of people overemphasize instantaneous speed. Like, oh, we can drill a hundred meters per hour instantaneously, but that matters less than your consistency, eh? So non-productive time in drilling is what starts to take over.
You’re drilling economics, you start spending a lot of time not drilling, but replacing the drill bit and running the pip in and of the hole. So for us, we’re not really trying to have, ungodly drilling speeds, inta instantaneously. We’re trying to have a very low, non-productive time, independent of temperature and depth.
What do we talk about? We talk about three to five meters per hour, all things considered. What does that translate to? It means you can get to 10 kilometers, that’s six miles. Within a hundred days you’re in the money there. To give you a sense, the Chinese recently did, an 11 kilometer hole, and I’m switching units because they, it’s been reporting those units, so about eight miles deep.
The first 10 kilometers took a year to drill, and the last one kilometer took another year to drill. So there is a massive exponential in there, and that’s what we’re going after. We don’t care about the instantaneous speed, we care about the non-productive time and the consistent speed. We wanna get down there regardless of depth in weeks, not years, and we don’t need to get there in days because that’s a small part of the economic output.
Really, the power output per well is what drives our COEs at that point.
Shayle Kann: All right. Just to, I guess, drive us home here, what should we expect in the coming years? You know, you’re among the pretty small number of companies who are going after super hot rock, geothermal. What are the milestones that we should be looking out for? What are the indications that this is gonna become?
Ultimately there will be a commercial project generating power and selling it to the grid. That’s the end state. Or maybe that, maybe that’s the end state part one. ’cause somebody will do that in what you call shallow systems and then it’s gonna take a while for somebody else to do it at 10 mile depth or something like that.
But you know, in the lead up to like there being the fir world’s first super hot rock, geothermal power plant, what are the milestones we should watch out for?
Carlos Araque: Yeah, the flow test. The flow test is the moment of truth is the equivalent of, uh, heating oil and the oil gushing out. So the flow test is the ability to drill down. Two wells usually connect them through a fractured network and produce steam at a given temperature and pressure and flow rate. That, if you can see that, if you can point to that and you can say, look, it’s durable, it’s, it has lost temperature, it hasn’t lost flow rate.
The rest is relatively straightforward. You build a power plant on the surface to convert that steam. To, to electricity. So the flow test is the thing we all should be watching for. I wanna, and I, and I wanna see flow tests that are super hot and they can be subcritical or super critical, it doesn’t really matter.
But hovering the 400 degrees Celsius, or 800 Fahrenheit. And I wanna see them, in a variety of depths in the three milers, in the four milers, in the five milers. And that’s the roadmap. For us in particular, the project in Oregon gets that flow test by the end of this year. By the end of 2026, Quas has a commercial grade injector producer per EGS system producing 25 to 30 megawatt equivalent electric output from a flow test that is.
Shayle Kann: like three mile depth
Carlos Araque: At a, at a three mile dead plus or minus, correct. From there in 2028, so two years later, we’ll do another version of that that is not at three miles, but a little bit deeper and above the 400 degrees Celsius. So we’re basically walking up the temperatures at that site. To unlock those, output, those multiples in output.
So in 28, we’ll have the first ever super critical. The first one is subcritical flow test. And, and then you continue from there. Now Quas has a part, the path on technology development. The drill itself is doing its own thing, running ahead of the projects, requirements. And by 27 we drilled five kilometers.
So three miles at 500 degrees Celsius or more, in that location. And by 28 we do twice that 10 kilometers or six miles at 500 degrees Celsius or more at at at another location. So what the drill is doing is establishing that the rock can be accessed, and that’s the technology development roadmap.
What the project is doing is showing the project economics and line of side to this l, to those lco is when you do the hotter version of geothermal.
Shayle Kann: Maybe you’re gonna do both. But if you, if you succeed in a, a flow test, end of 26 or whenever it happens at three mile depth and just a little under 400 degrees C. Or 400 F sorry. That’s probably, I mean, depending on your drilling cost, I suppose that’s probably good enough to, to be a commercial system.
Why then make the next step, go to four mile depth, you know, walk your way up the temperature gradient. Why not, produce and sell power at three miles.
Carlos Araque: We will, we will just, we don’t call it Topco. So Topco is not the company that does that. It becomes a project code that’s capitalized with project level financing, with dead vehicles, with vendors. So you spin out those projects and they become their own thing. But that’s no longer the mission of the Topco.
The Topco enables those playbooks for the project codes to actually execute and scale them. But yeah, that’s exactly what happens the minute you do these. Many people, many players, will want to do that. And that is what we call success. It means people will go for this harder version of EGS that are actionable, doable.
They’ll see the economics and scale them through the, increasing lower cost of capital and larger supply chain. So yes, that’s what happens.
Shayle Kann: All right, Carlos. This was a lot of fun. I think I’ve, I’ve, I, I’ve made it the entire conversation without using, let’s go deeper as a. Metaphor. So I’m pretty proud of myself to be honest. But that was just as deep as I wanted to go, so thank you.
Carlos Araque: Excellent. Thank you.
