Quaise Energy Is Vaporizing Rock to Reach Geothermal Heat

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is one of the more humbling artifacts of 20th-century engineering ambition. Soviet scientists spent nearly two decades grinding a hole into the Kola Peninsula — 12.2 kilometers straight down — and then stopped. Not because they ran out of money or will, but because the rock at that depth had turned plastic from heat, and no drill bit in existence could keep cutting through it. The Earth simply refused.

That story is the founding parable of Quaise Energy, an MIT spinout that announced a $134 million Series B close on July 7th, led by Prelude Ventures with participation from Japan's JER and Sumitomo Corporation. Total funding now sits at $230 million. The pitch: what if you threw away the drill bit entirely?

The Beam

Quaise's system uses a gyrotron — a device originally developed to heat plasma in fusion reactors — to fire high-power millimeter-wave energy down a borehole. The beam doesn't cut rock. It ablates it, turning solid granite directly into vapor. Nothing mechanical contacts the rock face, so nothing wears out. The technology traces back to more than a decade of research by Paul Woskov at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which means the physics isn't speculative — gyrotrons exist, they work, and they've been doing serious industrial and scientific work for years.

The question is whether they work at depth, continuously, while simultaneously clearing the vaporized rock they produce.

Quaise has burned through more than 100 meters of granite under full-scale field conditions, and their central Texas test site is approaching 1 kilometer — which would set a record for non-contact drilling. The commercial target is more than 3 miles down, into rock sitting at 300–500°C. At those temperatures, water heated by the rock carries enough energy that a superhot geothermal plant can match the power density of fossil fuels and nuclear — from a fraction of the wells on a fraction of the land.

That's the promise. The gap between 1 kilometer of lab-adjacent depth and 5+ kilometers of commercial-grade borehole is where most of the $230 million has to work.

Their flagship project, Obsidian, is already underway on federal geothermal leases in Oregon's Deschutes National Forest — one of the most geologically studied geothermal regions in the country. Quaise says the site has gigawatt-scale potential. The target: first electricity to the grid by 2030.

The Founder's Position — As Far As the Public Record Goes

Quaise's CEO, Carlos Araque, has become the company's most visible advocate in the public arena, making the rounds of energy conferences and podcast circuits with a consistent argument: the drilling problem is solvable, and solving it unlocks a resource that is effectively unlimited on human timescales. Based on his public statements, Araque positions the 2030 timeline not as a moonshot but as a consequence of the learning curve already demonstrated in oil and gas — where drilling costs fall fast once the playbook is written.

What Araque says publicly when pushed on the 2030 date, or what keeps him up at night about millimeter-wave stability at depth, isn't something I can report from his public record with any specificity. What's clear is that the framing he's chosen — "we're not inventing new physics, we're applying existing technology to a new context" — is doing real work in investor conversations. Prelude Ventures and Sumitomo didn't write nine-figure checks because the geology is uncertain. They wrote them because they believe the engineering path from here to there is navigable. Whether Araque has convinced himself of that, or is convincing himself in real time alongside his investors, is the kind of thing you'd need to actually sit across from him to know.

The Other Revolution

While Quaise is working on the hardest version of the problem, another company is already selling electricity.

Fervo Energy took a different approach: horizontal drilling, borrowed straight from the fracking industry. The concept is geometrically elegant. A vertical well is a lottery ticket — you sink millions into a hole that may never contact enough hot rock to justify the cost. Drill horizontally through the same rock formation and a single well sweeps through vastly more heat-bearing granite. Fervo CEO Tim Latimer has called that single change "the key that made the economics work."

The learning curve is the part that should make skeptics pay attention. Fervo's first horizontal geothermal well took 75 days, cost $13 million, and destroyed 13 drill bits. Their latest generation drilled a 7,500-foot horizontal section through solid granite in 21 days, cutting costs by millions, using ordinary oil and gas rigs and crews. That's a 70% reduction in drilling time. In 2023, Fervo partnered with Google in Nevada, drilled two wells 2.4 kilometers deep with roughly 1-kilometer horizontal sections, and produced over 3 megawatts — more than double what any enhanced geothermal system had previously achieved.

At Cape Station in Utah, Fervo's wells now reach hotter rock and produce around 10 megawatts each. The plant is on track to deliver 100 megawatts to the grid in 2026, scale to 400 megawatts by 2028, and holds federal permits for up to 2 gigawatts. That last number deserves to sit with you for a moment: 2 gigawatts, from a single permitted site, using technology that already works.

The Customer Problem That Solved Itself

The perpetual knock on geothermal — even when the engineering is credible — has been the customer side. Utilities are slow, PPAs are complicated, and geothermal's intermittency advantage over solar and wind means nothing if nobody will pay a premium for 24/7 clean baseload.

Then AI happened.

Data centers need clean power around the clock. That's not a preference — it's an operational requirement. Solar and wind, alone, can't deliver it. Geothermal can. Google signed an offtake deal with Fervo; that partnership is now a case study in why hyperscalers are the natural first customer for enhanced geothermal. The interesting question now isn't whether this customer class exists — it clearly does — it's which hyperscaler moves next, and whether that second deal accelerates the market the way Google's first deal with Fervo validated it.

The Risks That Aren't Going Away

Geothermal has an induced seismicity problem, and the honest version of this story doesn't skip it. Enhanced geothermal systems require fracturing rock to create or expand the permeability needed for fluid flow. Fracturing rock releases stress. An EGS project in Pohang, South Korea was linked to a significant seismic event in 2017. The Pohang case remains contested in the scientific literature — causation versus correlation, the role of pre-existing fault structures — but it's the reason any serious geothermal developer now runs seismic monitoring programs and has induced-seismicity response protocols built into their operating agreements. It's a manageable risk. It is not a solved risk.

For Quaise specifically, the seismic profile is different — they're not fracturing in the same way — but the technical unknowns are steeper. Keeping a millimeter-wave beam stable at multi-kilometer depths, while continuously clearing vaporized rock from a borehole, has never been done. The physics says it should be possible. The engineering says it's very hard. The 2030 deadline for Project Obsidian requires that "very hard" becomes "done" in roughly five years.

The IEA estimates next-generation geothermal could supply up to 8% of global electricity by 2050 — as much as 800 gigawatts — and that the technical potential of engineered geothermal exceeds 100 times today's entire global electricity demand. Those numbers are genuine, and they're also the kind of numbers that have a long history of staying theoretical.

What's different about this moment isn't the ceiling — it's the floor. Fervo is already delivering megawatts. Drilling costs are falling on a curve that looks like the early days of shale. The oil and gas workforce, whose skills transfer directly to geothermal, is available and looking for work as fossil fuel investment contracts. Capital is flowing.

The Soviets spent 20 years grinding toward the heat and lost to the rock. One company is now trying to beat granite with energy beams borrowed from fusion research, while another is already selling electricity from wells drilled sideways through it. The heat has always been there. The race is over the price.