Issue #22 — Quaise Energy

Alright, we've spent a lot of time in this newsletter chasing power.

Our civilization is starving for it, and there's no sign of that letting up. AI alone is eating electricity like it's got something to prove. Like Mitch and Phil ordering 15 wings Friday night. It’s bulking season apparently. So, we've gone looking in some wild places for it. We left the planet entirely to put data centers in orbit. We tried to bottle the sun in a box of hot rocks. And we strapped a nuclear reactor to a truck.

But we skipped perhaps the most obvious one. We keep looking up — at the sun, at space, and out on the surface. Nobody looks down.

Which is strange, because there's a gigantic fireball down there too. Four thousand miles beneath your feet, Earth's core runs about as hot as the surface of the sun. And the whole way down, it just keeps getting warmer. It's under every country, every backyard, every data center. The single largest energy source on the planet, and it's just… sitting there. Virtually limitless.

So why are we still burning things?

Because getting to it is arguably the hardest thing humanity has ever tried. And we've got the abandoned sites to prove it — but that's the next section.

Enter Quaise Energy. An MIT spinout that made a decision a 6-year-old with a shovel would be proud of: if a drill bit can't survive down there… don't send one. Send a beam of energy instead.

Quaise isn't digging a hole. They're melting one — straight toward the biggest battery this planet has to offer.

Okay but how

First, let’s talk about how hard “down there” really is.

Our deepest hole ever is the Kola Superdeep Borehole — a Soviet project above the Arctic Circle that started in 1970 aiming for 15 kilometers. They drilled for nearly two DECADES and quit at 12,262 meters. Roughly 7.6 miles. Not even out of the crust.

Why'd they stop? Heat. Scientists predicted it’d be about 100°C down there. They hit 180°C. And far enough down, granite stops behaving like the rock on your countertops and starts behaving like putty — oozing back into the hole you just opened. Like sand collapsing into the pit you just dug at the beach.

Among other problems, the Earth was closing the hole faster than they could open it. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, the money went with it, and everyone went home. Today it's a rusted metal cap welded shut in an empty field.

By Rakot13 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21029748

That's the problem Quaise is up against. And their answer is to stop drilling entirely.

The machine at the center of this is a gyrotron — a Soviet invention from the 1960s that's been primarily used heating fusion plasma to 100 million degrees. Almost as hot as North Carolina in late July. It’s basically a microwave. Just astronomically more powerful.

And drilling with a beam isn't a new idea — people spent decades trying it with lasers and barely scratched the dirt. What changed was the wavelength. Millimeter waves carry the power lasers never could.

Here's the setup. The gyrotron stays up top. The beam runs down standard oil-and-gas pipe acting as a guide, hits the rock face, and vaporizes it — while pressurized gas carries the dust back up and out, like the glass elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What's not down there? Drill bits, a motor, or anything fragile enough to collapse under heat and pressure. Certainly not the English National Soccer Team. All of it stays safely up top.

And here's the science fiction part. The beam doesn't just remove the rock — it melts the walls to a glassy substance on the way down. Same physics as the Kola site, opposite outcome. That hole got swallowed up. This one seals shut behind the beam — a glassy tube, miles into the Earth.

Now to pump the brakes, they're not doing it all with beaming tech. A gyrotron at 10 feet is overkill. Conventional rigs can handle the soft stuff up top, then the beam takes over for the part nobody's ever done. A closer in baseball, if you will. Their target: 3 to 20 kilometers, 300 to 500°C. HOT HOT HOT.

So where are they today? Test samples in their lab and real world tests at their Texas site. Going deeper every week.

Still nowhere near where the Soviets. But they needed 19 years and an empire's budget.

The guys who started it

Every good origin story needs a mad scientist. Quaise has Paul Woskov.

Woskov spent decades at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center as a research engineer — the kind of guy who works with gyrotrons casually, the way you and I work with a screwdriver. In 2008, MIT put out a call for new geothermal drilling ideas, and Woskov had the thought that this entire issue is built on: I already point the most powerful beams on Earth at fusion plasma. Why not point one at a rock instead?

So he did. For years. Aiming a gyrotron at granite and basalt and melting clean glassy holes straight through them — his office filled up with little scorched rock samples, each one proof the physics worked. He hit 3,000°C on a tabletop with a fraction of the power a real rig would use, and concluded there's no real temperature limit at all. Then, being an academic and not a CEO, he mostly went back to his lab.

Enter Carlos and Matt.

In 2018, Carlos Araque saw Woskov's scorched rocks and understood what he was looking at. And Araque is exactly the guy you'd want to understand it — he'd spent ~15 years at SLB, the largest oilfield services company on the planet. Then he ran technical operations at Engine Ventures, MIT's fund for exactly this kind of moonshot. A lifelong oil-and-gas man, staring at the thing that could kill oil and gas. A flip like LeBron from the Lakers to the 76ers.

He brought Matt Houde, a geothermal guy who'd go on to run the company's $5M ARPA-E grant to develop the drilling tech, and the two of them spun Quaise out of MIT in 2018. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla liked it enough to write a check on one condition: Araque had to quit his job and run it himself. So he did.

The honest take

Ok, time to take a step back.

Quaise is still far from the prize. The deepest they've gone with millimeter waves is at their testing site in Texas. The dream is 3 to 20 kilometers — deeper into hotter, weirder rock than anything the beam has touched. Every kilometer down is a new set of problems nobody's ever had, because nobody's ever been there.

The first plant is a bit of a magic trick. Project Obsidian's (absolutely incredible name) early wells will be drilled the old-fashioned way — conventional rigs drilling through Oregon rock — because Newberry's heat sits shallow enough that you don't strictly need the fancy stuff. Which is smart, by the way. Prove you can build a superhot power plant first, prove the science-fiction-sounding beam at full depth second. But it means the flashiest part of the story isn't what's carrying Obsidian across the finish line. Not yet.

And they've got nearby competition. Another startup, Mazama Energy, is chasing superhot geothermal at the same Newberry site with completely different tech. Competition's a good sign — it means the end goal is real — but Quaise doesn't get to drill down there alone.

Then there's the part nobody's solved. No one has ever run a power plant on 300-to-500°C rock. Drilling the hole is the first piece of the pie. Getting water down, steam back up, and keeping it from corroding or cracking for 30 years is the second piece — and that one's barely been touched.

None of that means it won't work. It just means the beam is the beginning, not the end. But my golly, is this one worth watching

If they pull this off

Here's the thing we've been dancing around all issue: the energy was never the problem. Getting to it was. So if Quaise can actually get there, they don't join the energy market — they rewrite it

So how much is down there? Well, as Woskov noted himself, virtually limitless. Tapping 0.1% could supply the world needs for 20 million years? Yeah… sounds good to me.

This isn't "a nice addition to the energy mix." It's the solution. The solution that’s already under our feet. Quaise doesn't have to invent it, they just have to make the journey.

The entire clean-energy future might come down to whether you can melt a hole straight down and not screw it up.

That's about as Left Field as it gets.

Want to work out there?

You’re in luck. Quaise is hiring — field engineers, gyrotron people, and the crew that'll stand up the first superhot power plant on Earth. Mostly Houston, likely with trips to the Oregon volcano as Obsidian ramps.

Where else does the job require pointing a fusion-grade beam into the ground next to a volcano?

Open roles → job-boards.greenhouse.io/quaise