Digging deep for super hot geothermal

Despite its ability to deliver ample carbon-free energy, the potential of geothermal and EGS 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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.

• 0:07Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan, and this is Catalyst.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 0:25Shayle Kann?

  Coming up, a slightly deep dive into extremely deep geothermal.

• 0:37Speaker 00

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• 1:19Speaker 00

  stand out, build market leadership, and become category-defining brands. From breakthrough startups to global industry leaders, their team brings the expertise, relationships, and track record to accelerate your momentum. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

• 1:35Speaker 03

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• 2:10Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. 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

• 2:51Shayle Kann?

  of heat close to the surface for a traditional geothermal. For enhanced geothermal systems, EGS, those roles 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 Quays, which is a startup going after super-hot geothermal. Let's hear his vision. Carlos, welcome.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Thank you. Good to be here.

• 3:31Shayle 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 doing like a traditional hydrothermal geothermal system, the types of things that, you know, we were building in the 70s and 80s and are building some of now, again, today, how deep am I drilling? And how hot is the rock that I'm looking for?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  For traditional hydrothermal, not very deep at all. You're going maybe a mile at most. 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 going to be talking about today. Then modern geothermal doesn't require that. You'll bring your own water.

• 4:24Shayle 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.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is correct. Those are very near-surface systems. They're even shallower than what oil and gas would require.

• 4:45Shayle Kann?

  Okay, and so the whole point to 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're interested in, what type of depth and temperature should I be thinking about?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:25Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so 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 kind of 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?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so oil and gas systems are not depth 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 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 of temperature, I would tell you that oil and gas systems can already drill to the vast majority of depths that we're talking about here, miles and miles, three, four, five, six, seven, eight miles under the earth.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  But when you add the temperature, which is really the target we're going for, then you see a massive gap. To put it blunt, the oil and gas mostly happens at two to three miles deep. It's rare to find it below that because it starts to get too hot. And here we're talking about that being the beginning of the geothermal frontier we're unlocking. So the end of one is the beginning of the other one.

• 7:58Shayle 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 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?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's usually the Ring of Fire, so anywhere in the Pacific side of the country, and all of the Pacific 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. And so it's not a small market by any means. You can also find it in the Atlantic Ridge. So Iceland, for example, you don't need to go anywhere close to those depths 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

• 9:10Speaker 02

  three miles, closer to three miles than closer to 12 miles.

• 9:14Shayle 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?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're talking about 10 times the power. So the Icelandics were the first ones to talk about this at length. It has to do with physics. It has to do with the thermophysical properties of water, basically higher densities, lower viscosity. It has to do with the thermodynamic conversion efficiencies between the heat and electricity. So at the end of the day, the same wellbore, 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.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  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 1,000 Fahrenheit, 2,000 Fahrenheit, it actually works against yourself. 800 really is the Goldilocks zone for that supercritical property of water. And you're talking about a 10x.

• 10:34Shayle Kann?

  So the trade is basically you're going to spend more to drill a well unquestionably. You're going deeper and as we're going to talk about, you need different materials and a different kind of system if you're going to go really, really deep because of that, because to dealing with the temperature exactly. So apples to apples, you're going to have a more expensive well, but you're going to get 10x more power out of that well. And so you could have, your budget is basically, you know, to a first order, 10x 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 five miles, but you're not going to be able to do traditional hydrothermal anyway, just because you don't have enough heat near the surface. So that's

• 11:19Shayle Kann?

  kind of the interesting trade here. I guess the other thing we should talk about though 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 that, how does that look at these greater depths?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in general, permeability decreases as you go deeper. You have more lithostatic pressures and that's going to work against you. However, 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 pore pressure fluids will actually open that up. I did a, very early in my days in Quays 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

• 12:18Speaker 02

  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 wellbores in oil and gas, you have lost circulation events. In other words, you fracture, you activate the permeability in the rock that's already there. So we believe that in the geothermal, we're going for this Order deeper kind, activating that permeability is 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. If it's there, it's there, it's closed. We're talking about activating that permeability through fluid flow.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:11Shayle Kann?

  So if I can try to repeat that to make sure I understand it, expectation is in the places you're going to be drilling, there will be low permeability. So you will need to fracture.

• 13:23Shayle Kann?

  We don't currently frac 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 frac essentially because you're basically going to inject drilling muds and those are going to open up a fracture network just because of how the rock works. Do we have, like, do we have, has anyone done that at that depth ever?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  So we don't access these depths at these temperatures, right? Any hole that's deep in the world is not hot. So this effect doesn't quite manifest, like Kola in Russia, the KTB in Germany, they're cold. They're barely, they're half 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 this effect. But that's correct. The physics tells you, and the lab experiments tell you, that the density of the colder fluids play a disproportionate role in fracture initiation and propagation at these temperature depth combinations.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Now, the first project, the one we're doing in Oregon, will be the beginning of showing those effects. I think we're going to be the first people in the world that actually show and start pointing the way to that following from lab results. Yeah.

• 14:48Shayle Kann?

  So I guess if you think about it, the high level, there's an obvious reason to do this, right? If you can successfully drill to these depths and these temperatures, the resource is 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 kind of big technical challenges, I think 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,

• 15:33Shayle Kann?

  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?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  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 a hydrothermal vent or a 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 say that if you can access these temperatures, regardless of depth,

• 16:40Speaker 02

  you've initiated a journey for human creativity and industry to actually conquer that. That frontier, that geological frontier, and as you correctly pointed out, I think the price that we gain by doing so is enormous. It's unlike any other energy source out there. It dwarfs 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. Our things that can can get unlocked one step at a time, starting with those shallower systems and progressing sequentially to the deeper systems. We're not going to develop a deep system on day one because that's unnecessarily hard. We're going to develop the shallow systems on day one and progress from there.

• 17:29Speaker 00

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• 19:38Shayle 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 hole, all the stuff that is built for the oil and gas industry, like how much of that stuff, the casing, the wireline 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? Is it 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?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  I think they are incremental evolution, so the big gaps have already been solved for the 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 are kind of...

• 20:24Shayle Kann?

  You say shallower, you mean the like three-mile type of depth?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  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, so 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 SAGD, Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage, which injects steam, steam at temperatures up to 600 degrees Fahrenheit to mobilize very heavy oils and produce them. So there's a whole... Whole array of techniques, materials, tools that have been developed for that market in oil and gas

• 21:09Speaker 02

  that provide evolutionary pathways for doing this 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 hole because everything's going to 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 and a market for the providers of the world to innovate in that space.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  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 muds or liquids through the system to keep them cool while they do their job. 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.

• 22:14Shayle 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 going to be tens of, to get to that depth is going to be tens of millions of dollars. That's sort of normal if you're in 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 going to 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.

• 22:54Shayle Kann?

  How much can you learn and prove without going to that depth versus how much you're just going to have to drill that deep to get there?

• 23:03Speaker 02

  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 because you're going to run out of money and you're not going to 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

• 23:46Speaker 02

  or pay PPA because we know that we can point to all of the solutions with precedent.

• 23:52Shayle Kann?

  Well, how has it been? Who drilled the previous well to that temperature depth combination and why?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  In that particular location, Neighbors, Neighbors is our drilling partner, right? So another reason why we're working with them. This temperature depth, so this shallow super hot rock wells are have precedent, going all the way back to the 70s. 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 their first commercial EGS system that's super hot rock. Now, that wouldn't work in a deeper system, but that

• 24:42Speaker 02

  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 100 million dollar gaps that is going to take you to do so.

• 25:05Shayle Kann?

  So, but wait, so Neighbors, in this case, which is, you know, the company doing the drilling, they drilled 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 did never, never completed a power plant with it because presumably it didn't work in some way or another? Like what, what stopped them?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  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 of this particular location in Oregon, they were looking for hydrothermal systems. So they didn't find them, and therefore they didn't proceed. By shifting from hydrothermal to EGS, you open up the pathway now. So again,

• 25:56Shayle Kann?

  I see. So they didn't find the permeability they wanted, they, they abandoned it, but your, your hope is that you'll be able to open up that permeability?

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Correct. And, and just like that location, I can point to more than 50 wells drilling 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 1,000 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 a first commercial project, get itself into business and keep expanding from there.

• 26:36Shayle Kann?

  Well, it's interesting because 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.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:16Shayle 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 costs, or maybe, what is it, 50% of your cost in a traditional hydrothermal system is just the drilling cost, something like that, because you have all this above-ground infrastructure too. But you're cutting that cost effectively by 10x, at least relative to the denominator of power produced.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 27:45Shayle Kann?

  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 going to have to open up?

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:57Shayle Kann?

  Walk me through how to think about the unit economics.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you're correct. So normally, in regular geothermal, you think of the unit economics as 50/50, very roughly speaking. It's about 50% drilling cost, 50% power plant surface costs. With the super-hot rock kind, that changes significantly because 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, getting more power output per well or per power plant, you're actually working on the revenue side of the equation to lower the LCOE. So for us, the drilling cost will be in the 20% to

• 28:43Speaker 02

  30% of the LCOE. The higher outputs will be a big part of bringing those LCOEs down, and we see $100 per megawatt hour at the meter, no matter where you are 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 they're not quite as expensive to build. 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 costs do change, but the LCOEs will range in the $50 to $100 per megawatt

• 29:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:38Shayle 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 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?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the important thing with speed is the total average speed. So it's like the tortoise and the hare. And a lot of people over emphasize instantaneous speed, like, oh, we can drill 100 meters per hour instantaneously, but that matters less than your consistency. So nonproductive time in drilling is what starts to take over your drilling economics. You start spending a lot of time not drilling, but replacing the drill bit and running the pipe in and out the hole. So for us, we're not really trying to have ungodly drilling speeds instantaneously. We're trying to have a very low nonproductive time, independent of temperature and depth. What do we talk about?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  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 at six miles within 100 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 reported in 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 nonproductive time and the consistent speed. We want to get down there regardless of depth in

• 31:33Speaker 02

  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 out that they're well is what drives our COs at that point.

• 31:44Shayle 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 going to become? Ultimately, there will be a commercial project generating power and selling it to the grid. That's the end state. Or maybe that's the end state, part one, because somebody will do that in what you call shallow systems, and then it's going to take a while for somebody else to do it at 10-mile depths or something like that. But, you know, in the lead-up to like there being the world's first super-hot rock geothermal power plant, what are the milestones we should watch out for?

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the flow test. The flow test is the moment of truth. It's the equivalent of heating oil and the oil gushing out. So the flow test is the ability to drill down two wells usually, connect them through a fracture 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 hasn't 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 electricity. So the flow test is the thing we all should be watching for.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  I want to, and I want to see flow tests that are super-hot, and they can be subcritical or supercritical, it doesn't really matter, but hovering in the 400 degrees Celsius or 800 Fahrenheit. And I want to 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, Quays has a commercial-grade injector producer per EGS system producing 25 to 30 megawatt equivalent electric output from a flow test.

• 33:53Shayle Kann?

  At like three mile depth plus or minus?

• 33:56Speaker 02

  At a three mile depth 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 or so. We're basically walking up the temperatures at that site to unlock those outputs, those multiples in output. So in 28, we'll have the first ever supercritical, the first one is subcritical, flow test. And then you continue from there. Now, Quays has a parallel path on technology development. The drill itself is doing its own thing, running ahead of the project's requirements. And by 27, we drill five kilometers, so three miles at 500 degrees Celsius or more in that location.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  And by 28, we do twice that, 10 kilometers, so six miles at 500 degrees Celsius or more 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 sight to those LCOs when you do the hotter version of geothermal.

• 35:04Shayle Kann?

  Maybe you're going to do both, but if you succeed in a flow test, end of 26 or whenever it happens, at three mile depth and just a little under 400 degrees C, or 400 degrees F, sorry.

• 35:20Shayle Kann?

  That's probably, I mean, depending on your drilling cost, I suppose, that's probably good enough 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?

• 35:35Speaker 02

  We will, we will, just we don't call it topco. So Quays topco is not the company that does that. Where 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 top co. The top co enables those playbooks for the project co's to actually execute and scale them. Uh, but yeah, that's exactly what happens. The minute you do this, many people, many players uh will want to do that. Um, and that is what we call success. It means people will go for these hotter version of EGS that are actionable, doable. They'll see the economics and scale them through the um increasing lower cost of capital and larger supply chain.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  So, yes, that's what happens.

• 36:21Shayle 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.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Excellent. Thank you. Cheers.

• 36:41Shayle Kann?

  Carlos Araque is the CEO and co-founder of Quayz Energy. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode was produced by Max Savage Levenson. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shayle Khan and this is Catalyst.