Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque About this episode Growing up in Colombia, Carlos Araque and his father liked to take apart bicycles and motorcycles then put them back together. This love of tinkering led Carlos to study engineering at MIT and eventually launch a career in the oil and gas industry. After 15 years of this work, Carlos realized he was uniquely suited to be a part of the global energy transition away from fossil fuels. He returned to his alma mater to help run a startup accelerator, and soon, Quaise Energy was born.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Carlos shares how his company plans to drill the deepest holes ever to unlock the nearly limitless potential of geothermal energy. Carlos explains why he sees such promise with this energy source and how he spread his optimism to investors to raise more than $70 million and counting.
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5:07 Guy Raz? Visit mobili fuels.com for details. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. The term renewable energy often conjures the image of row upon row of solar panels or giant wind turbines on a hillside. But there's another nearly limitless source of clean energy that you might not immediately think of, one that's right below our feet: geothermal energy. Now, the core of our planet is over 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about the same temperature as the surface of the sun. And if we could somehow tap into all that heat, we'd have more than enough energy to power human civilization for millions of years.
5:51 Guy Raz? The problem is, unless you live somewhere like Iceland or another volcanically active area, we just can't get to it. It's buried too deep underground. But that may be about to change. My guest today is Carlos Araque. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Quayz Energy, which plans to use a new technology developed at MIT to drill deeper than any hole that's ever been drilled before. And if his experimental approach works, Carlos envisions a world where anyone, anywhere in the world, could have access to clean, nearly unlimited geothermal energy. Carlos Araque, welcome to How I Built This Lab.
6:31 Speaker 01 Thank you, Guy. Good to be here.
6:33 Guy Raz? All right, so Carlos, you grew up in Colombia, but you went to study mechanical engineering at MIT. Were you interested in engineering and building things from a pretty early age?
6:44 Speaker 01 I think I was, but I was not aware of that. It was my father who first brought it to my attention. And the way it came about is he would see me taking apart my bicycle and later my motorcycle, just out of curiosity, just laying out every single part in front of me to understand what it did. And he was the one who said, you have the mind of an engineer. You're very good in science and math and physics. You should probably study engineering. And at some point, when I was maybe 15, 16, he said, how about you go to MIT? And I said, what's MIT? I didn't know what MIT was. And I started researching, and this was back in 1995, 96. So there was, there's not a lot of connectivity. So I had to do a lot of research the old way.
7:28 Speaker 01 And found my way there, you know, that changed my life forever.
7:32 Guy Raz? Wow. You grew up in Medellin, in Colombia, and today it's a wonderful city and international destination. And but when you were growing up, it was like, it was kind of a war zone, right?
7:45 Speaker 01 It was. I mean, I was born in 1978, so in the late 80s, early 90s, it was at the peak of violence. And I was, you know, my 10, 11, 12 year old boy running the streets of Medellin. I used to bike everywhere. And I remember vividly a car bombs going off, you know? It would be so usual to see those things. The city is a valley, so you would see it across the distance from one side of the valley to the other one. And you would count 10 car bombs in a day, maybe 14 in a bad day.
8:16 Guy Raz? Wow.
8:17 Speaker 01 Thinking about that, now that I'm a parent, it's crazy, you know? Having your child running around in the streets in that environment is just totally crazy. But that luckily changed. And by the time I left, you know, things had dramatically improved.
8:34 Speaker 01 Interesting upbringing, very, very complicated upbringing, but it's part of who you are. It makes you who you are.
8:43 Guy Raz? All right, so you headed off to MIT in the late 90s to study mechanical engineering. And I guess as an undergraduate, you were involved in building a solar vehicle. And this is a club on campus. Tell me, tell me what you did at that club.
8:59 Speaker 01 That is correct. So very early, I think before classes even started, I got pulled into this solar electric vehicle team by a friend, also from Colombia, who was a couple of years older. And I remember learning to weld, learning to put things together, learning to design the chassis of a car to make it light, to make it stiff, to make it go fast. I'm putting it all together. We would pull these cars together from scratch, literally from scratch, and we would go and race them. I went to Japan twice to race this car. I was too big to be the driver, but I would be part of the pit crew, making sure the mechanical
9:43 Speaker 01 systems, electrical systems were up to par. But we would run these things in closed loops, trace tracks for hours on end at speeds up to 60, 70 miles an hour. So quite fascinating that you can actually do this with solar energy. So very hands-on. A lot of engineering went into that and very early experience with actually building things that work and not only work, but work reliably and consistently.
10:11 Guy Raz? All right, so you finish your degree at MIT, stay there for a master's degree. And I guess right out of MIT, you're recruited to work for a big oil and gas drilling company called Schlumberger. Where did you go? Are they based in Europe?
10:32 Speaker 01 They are originally a French company, but by the time I joined, they were truly an international company. And Schlumberger hired me in one of the Houston facilities to be an engineer, to design tools that would go downhole into an oil well and do something.
10:56 Speaker 01 Um, you know, it's remarkable to imagine how many things going to making oil available to humanity. And there's a lot of technology that goes behind that. So right after MIT, two thousand two, went to Houston. Uh, started my career there, very technical, always wanted to be an engineer and be building things. And lived in Houston for, for eight years before I got transferred to Norway and then to England to expand my career in other directions. Uh, drilling was part of that, but it was not the only part of that. There's, there's other things like knowing where the oil is, you know, how do you know where things are down there?
11:35 Guy Raz? Hmm.
11:36 Speaker 01 Uh, how do you produce it efficiently? How do you process it? So a, a lot of technologies that from end to end make it possible. And I, I became very familiar with all of them. Uh, from a very technical angle. Um, of course, as you mature in your career, you inevitably get into the business side of things, you get into the commercialization side of things. So I became very aware of what it took to not only build and design the systems, these, these technologies, but also put them out into the world as commercial offerings by one of the largest, perhaps the largest technology company in the oil industry.
12:13 Guy Raz? Hmm. I'm curious, right? Because here you are with this, this background and this incredible expertise in, you know, in drilling techniques and in where to locate and identify oil and natural gas. And, and these are, we, we know, we all use it every day. I mean, these are, these are absolutely vital to, um, economies to function. We are dependent on fossil fuels, but was there a point when, when you were working for, for that company where you started to wonder whether you should use your talent in, in another way to, to maybe, maybe in a more sustainable sector around energy?
12:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, my, my wife was the first one to point that out, you know, to me, it all happened very late in my career, but according to her, it happened much earlier. I mean, I've been married to her for more than 21 years. So, so she knows me right outside of MIT as we were 22 and 23.
13:06 Speaker 01 I, I started becoming restless about energy transition around two thousand fifteen, two thousand sixteen. You know, I, I said to myself, you know, I have half of my career ahead of me. And I don't think it's going to be oil related. You know, the energy transition will happen in our generation. It has to happen. And I am in a very good spot, given my experience and still my career ahead of me, to actually transition myself into something different.
13:40 Speaker 01 I didn't know that it was going to be geothermal. I didn't know that it was going to be quays. That came later, but I obeyed that instinct. I said, you know, I need to walk away from oil and gas and try to find my way as a professional, as an engineer in this energy transition. That's surely going to happen in the rest of our lifetimes.
14:03 Guy Raz? You spent, I think, 14 or 15 years working at the same company in the oil and gas industry before you decided to leave, return to MIT to run one of their startup accelerators called The Engine. What inspired that change?
14:18 Speaker 01 So I became convinced that the reason we don't transition energy is first and foremost because we do not have as a species the technology to do it. Politics play a role, but it is really a technological gap first and foremost. So as I started to reason my way through these things and say, okay, if it's a technology gap, I'm pretty good at technology, let's go and find what that is. I then learned that in order to finance these very difficult technical undertakings, you know, they're capital intensive, time intensive, it takes very high risk capital. And if you're going to do that outside of the agenda of a corporation, it's probably going to be venture capital. So that's how I started converging on that pathway.
15:03 Guy Raz? So essentially you were sort of thinking in your mind, how can I make an impact? Or how can I make a contribution? In sustainable energy, but you weren't quite sure what it was going to be. But you knew that by by joining this accelerator at MIT, you might figure it out.
15:18 Speaker 01 I knew I was going to learn about venture capital, which was going to be a big part of the puzzle. Now, it all converged much more serendipitously than that, because not only did I learn venture capital, but I also learned about this technology that would become quays.
15:33 Guy Raz? Okay, we're going to talk about that technology in a moment. But first, I want to ask you about sustainable energy, right? Because so much of our focus is on solar and wind. And if, in fact, we had, you know, just millions and millions and millions of wind turbines around the world and, you know, covered the Sahara Desert in solar panels, would that be sufficient to to power all of our needs?
15:56 Speaker 01 I think it would, but the ecological consequences would be just as bad as putting CO2 into the atmosphere. So without getting too technical, the concept of power density matters here. So the idea that you use land to procure your power. When you start talking about the scale of the energy needs of humanity, which are ever increasing, if you try to do that with wind and solar, given that their power density is much, much less than fossil fuels, it would imply a premium on land use. We're talking about 100 times. At those scales, it starts to become an issue.
16:39 Speaker 01 It's like trading a black eye for two black eyes, right? So we cannot really that it's not going to be sustainable.
16:45 Guy Raz? So it sounds like you were trying to figure out what other sustainable energy alternatives we could use as a species to power our needs. Nuclear is one of them. You know, it's a relatively safe and sustainable source of energy, right?
16:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I converge on three things. And this is thinking at it like like an engineer. You know, I understood the oil industry well. I understood that it powered most of civilization and I understood how much energy that implies. So when you look at that, I think there's only three things that can do it. The first one is indeed nuclear fission, as you just mentioned. It has the scalability and the power density to do it. The second one is fusion, which is what the sun does, but it's still experimental and in research. And the third one is deep geothermal. Aside from those three, there's nothing else
17:39 Speaker 01 that can scale to the number of terawatts that we need. We consume about 23 terawatts in 2022. And keep in mind, Guy, we cannot afford to transition energy every 25 years. So this is really not about 2050. This is about setting up for the next 100 to 200 years. So we're really not designing for even 20, 30, 40 terawatts. We're designing for 100 plus terawatts. So certainly at those scales, you very quickly run out of options and the only options left are those
18:13 Guy Raz? three. All right, let's talk about geothermal energy because this is really where the story is headed. Iceland is a country a lot of people know that uses, gets a lot of its energy from geothermal sources because it's built on, you know, on volcanoes. And so they don't have to dig too deep to hit a geothermal source. And basically, I guess the way it works is you drill, you hit this source of heat, intense heat, and then what? You use that heat to, to like, heat up water that makes steam that powers a turbine, basically?
18:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. This heat essentially does the same that your coal power plant or gas power plant does. It boils water and that water moves the turbine, which makes electricity. It's just that for them it's easy because they can use the technology that already exists to do it. For everybody else in the world, that's not the case.
19:03 Guy Raz? Yeah. By the way, it is amazing to me and I, I think a lot of people listening are not going to admit this, but most of us don't understand how electricity works, but it's basically just a giant turbine that spins and it's either spinning because water is flowing through it, or there's a wind mill that's powering it, or generally it's steam. Basically, oil is burned and that heats up water and that creates steam and then it just churns a giant turbine that creates electricity.
19:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, precisely. I mean, and in the end, what we're proposing to do is don't change anything about what you just described. Just don't do it with a fossil fuel. Just get the steam from the ground, move the turbine, make electricity. But the question stretches very simply, what if you could access that, no matter where you are in the world? Could you make every single country energy independent? And the answer is yes. But how deep do you have to go? Well, if you want to cover the entire planet, if you want to make sure every single human being has access to geothermal energy, not just a little bit of it, not just a little bit to bathe in hot water, but also to power every single appliance and every single use of modern life, you have to drill 20 kilometers at most. That's
20:16 Speaker 01 12 miles. That doesn't mean you do it everywhere. But if you can do that, everything changes. You unlock a heat source, an energy source unlike anything that's available. It's right under your feet. It's local. It's no fuels. It's no waste. It's there. There's nothing that provides the energy security that geothermal can provide if you can go and tap it at those depths.
20:43 Guy Raz? We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, more from Carlos Araque about the potential of geothermal energy to power the world and how his company plans to drill deep enough to access it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
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24:38 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is Carlos Araque. He's the co-founder and CEO of Quayz Energy. It's a company that is determined to tap into geothermal energy sources around the world that could potentially change the way we source all of our energy. So Carlos, before the break, we were talking about, up until recently, the idea that anybody could, any country could tap into geothermal energy was not realistic because most of us don't live in Iceland or countries like Kenya that have geothermal energy close to the surface, right? That is just not possible. Otherwise, we'd all be doing it. So what's changed? What makes this potentially possible?
25:19 Speaker 01 The ability to drill deep enough. I think that's what changed, right? So when I met Paul Wascoff, I understood very quickly that-
25:27 Guy Raz? He's a, I should mention, he's a professor at MIT who is this kind of pioneer in drilling technology.
25:34 Speaker 01 Yeah. And when I first listened to him, I said, okay, what he's talking about is a disruption to how we drill into the earth. We can drill deeper, harder, faster, and therefore we can unlock geothermal, like Iceland, but for everybody on earth, no matter where you are. And Paul Wascoff was the person who first pointed this out, and not only pointed out, but he actually procured funding to go and show it in the lab. Now, he never drilled 20 kilometers down. But he demonstrated scientific principles that would allow that to be possible.
26:06 Guy Raz? So so what's different about his technology?
26:08 Speaker 01 We're we're moving away from mechanical drill bits. The drill bit wears because the rock is hard and it's hot. And you have to retrieve the drill bit from the bottom of that well. So you spend a lot of time replacing the drill bit and not drilling. And as you go deeper and deeper, you spend even more time not drilling, but replacing the drill bit. So the way we attack the problem is by moving away from mechanical systems. It's a radical new way to do the drilling. We're using electromagnetic waves. We're using microwaves, more precisely, to literally vaporize a hole to rock. So this this basically changes everything about drilling.
26:52 Guy Raz? Wait, so so instead of drilling with a bit, you essentially use basically waves of energy that just like vaporize a hole?
27:01 Speaker 01 That's right. We vaporize rock, we literally vaporize rock. And then we simply blow the ash, you know, those vapors become ash. We simply blow it out of the hole. And you keep doing this and you can get to depths that are impossible today with mechanical drills.
27:14 Guy Raz? Like like how deep?
27:16 Speaker 01 So we think we can get to 20 kilometers. This is twice as deep as we've ever drilled as humans. And precisely what's needed to make geothermal totally global and ubiquitous.
27:26 Guy Raz? Wow. And the the deepest hole ever drilled by humans is done by Russians is about 12 kilometers. And I think it took them like 20 years to to to drill that hole, right?
27:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, it it did take them from the early 70s to the late 80s. It was a scientific experiment trying to go that deep. And and they picked a place on the earth where it wasn't too hot. So they were really trying to keep it easy. It's not just about going deep, it's about going hot as well. So at the bottom of that hole, they reach 200 degrees Celsius, about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. You know, we're saying something different. We're not only going to drill those holes and deeper, but we're also going to do it much, much hotter because that's the price. We want a temperature. That's what we want to tap into.
28:19 Guy Raz? Just out of curiosity, how deep do you have to drill generally to get to oil or gas?
28:24 Speaker 01 So most drilling for oil and gas is relatively shallow. It only takes two to three kilometers to get to it. It's mostly close to the surface, right? Deeper than that, you have geothermal, which is the heat from the earth, and that goes a little bit deeper than that.
28:42 Guy Raz? All right. If the deepest hole ever drilled was 12 and a half kilometers, and it took the Russians 20 years to do it, and you're talking about a 20-kilometer hole, how long can you do this with high-intensity radio frequency waves?
28:55 Speaker 01 We're talking about weeks.
28:57 Guy Raz? Weeks? You can drill a 20-kilometer hole in weeks?
29:01 Speaker 01 That's right. You have to do these because you have to do a lot of them to re-power civilization. That's what we're talking about. We're not talking about years even. We're talking about weeks.
29:11 Guy Raz? Weeks. Okay, so let's talk about how this would work. You would drill a hole 20 kilometers down in weeks, and you get, finally, you hit, you tap into that source of heat. And then what do you do? You like pump water into that hole to get steam to come back up?
29:28 Speaker 01 That's right. So we would do these very close to an existing power plant because we want to pump water into that hole, we want to convert it to steam, and we want to run the steam through the power plant, just like it's been doing forever.
29:40 Guy Raz? So you can take an existing coal-fired power plant, and you would drill a 20-kilometer-deep hole right next to it, and then use the steam from that to power the same plant?
29:52 Speaker 01 That's right, and it could be one, two, three holes. It could be 10, 15, 20 kilometers, but that's precisely it. And everybody talks about retiring the power plants, you know, breaking them down. We have 10,000 power plants built in the world. How about we just repower them with clean geothermal steam?
30:09 Guy Raz? So you don't need to build new power plants, you're saying? You would just, all you need to do is just drill a deep hole and just get that to generate steam?
30:17 Speaker 01 That is the power of geothermal precisely. Right on the spot, you repower the power plant, you make it clean, you move on to the next one.
30:24 Guy Raz? And right now, we can imagine what it looks like to drill a hole for natural gas or oil, right? Because it's a big drill bit. What does the rigging look like? Because it's, I know initially you are actually using a drill bit just to kind of open up the hole, right? To get in there a little bit. But once you're in there, then you just start firing these waves, these like microwaves. What is the machine that does that? What does that look like?
30:46 Speaker 01 So it's a gyrotron, but the drilling rig is the same. So the only difference is we're going to integrate a gyrotron, which is a, it basically generates microwaves. And we're going to beam this energy through the pipe that's hanging from the drilling rig. So if you look at it, you couldn't tell the difference between an oil and gas rig operation and what we're doing. But we're injecting energy into the hole. We're not rotating a drill string.
31:13 Guy Raz? So basically, once you, once you start to inject that energy, you're just vaporizing rocks. It's just vaporize, vaporize, vaporize.
31:19 Speaker 01 You can, absolutely. That's the power of these, of this idea. You know, we're beaming a megawatt of energy consistently to vaporize this rock.
31:28 Guy Raz? And, and is there any substance, any material that is, is impenetrable? Or can, anything that you are aware of down there below our surface can be vaporized with this technology?
31:42 Speaker 01 Anything that's down there in the basement rock can be vaporized through this. If you try to vaporize a metallic wall, it's not going to work. But there's no metallic walls down there. So, so rock vaporizes.
31:58 Guy Raz? I'm not an expert in the physics of holes, but I do have kind of some sense of how pressure works. And I'm assuming that the deeper you go, the more potential there is for that hole to collapse just because of the weight of the earth above you. It's like the deeper you go under the ocean, like, you know, that the potential for your internal organs to get crushed increases because of the pressure of the water. So how do you prevent that in a hole?
32:23 Speaker 01 So when you're drilling, the energy, you use temperature to stabilize the hole. And it basically keeps itself open. It creates a glass wall that's very, very, very strong. We've seen this in the lab.
32:35 Guy Raz? Oh, because when you heat the rock, it turns into glass?
32:38 Speaker 01 It turns into glass. And this glass actually supports the hole itself. This happens in nature, Guy. You know, if you look at volcanoes, there's glass pipes that get formed. And these things endure for geological time. So we know this is doable.
32:50 Guy Raz? Wow. All right. So in 2018, you co-founded a company called Quays. You co-founded with Paul Wasco, a professor at MIT and a few others. And you began to seek out funds to do this. This is not like, I always say this in the show, like, this is not like making cookies, right? This analogy, because we've done so many cookie brands. It's not, this is not, this is not something that you can just like snap your fingers, it's going to happen tomorrow. This is a long-term project. It's unproven. And it's going to be really expensive. You can't do this with just a few million dollars. I know you had some initial backing from Vino Kusla and a few others. But was it hard to get to generate interest from investors initially?
33:35 Speaker 01 So surprisingly, not. I mean, there's enough visioners in this world that will see the potential of these ideas and will give the money. The more challenging part is to continue to make that bigger and bigger and bigger. It means one thing to raise 1, 2, 3, 5 million dollars. And it's another one to raise 50 or more million dollars. So don't get me wrong. These things take a lot of time and diligence to get off the ground. But believe me, there's amazing people in this world with a lot of capital that will see the value of the ideas we're proposing.
34:09 Guy Raz? All right. At this point now, you're four years in. You've raised 70 million dollars, which sounds like a crazy amount of money. But I can't, I can't even imagine the amount of money you need to do this. First of all, how expensive is it going to be to drill one of these holes?
34:25 Speaker 01 Twenty million dollars.
34:26 Guy Raz? Just twenty million dollars, okay.
34:28 Speaker 01 Twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars per well. If it's twenty kilometers, so it is expensive. But think about it, you're going to get energy out of that hole for the next thirty to fifty years.
34:40 Guy Raz? Yeah.
34:40 Speaker 01 It pays for itself.
34:42 Guy Raz? Yeah. You know, I mean, it's interesting because you've devoted most of your career so far to the oil and gas. That's what you were in Texas and Norway. And you went to work in these oil-producing countries. Is there interest in what you're trying to do from the oil and gas industry?
34:59 Speaker 01 There is, yeah. We have two investors that are oil and gas companies, and they're very, very keen and very supportive of doing this technology. You know, others are watching from the sidelines. You know, some of them incredulous, some of them very, very curious. But clearly, this looks and feels a lot like what they're used to. So, once it works, this is going to be a no-brainer for them to endorse and to actually do for themselves.
35:28 Guy Raz? And there's presumably money to be made, right? Because if you're an investor in geothermal technology and you own a power plant, well, you own the source of that energy.
35:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, how much energy does the world need? You know, trillions of dollars' worth of it over the next twenty, thirty, forty years. So, there is a lot of money to be made. And that's going to be an important part of making this scale fast. You know, I want geothermal to look as attractive to the oil and gas industry as their current business of oil and gas is.
36:02 Guy Raz? Hang tight, we're going to take another quick break, but we'll be back with Carlos Araki and talk more about geothermal energy in just a moment. Stay with us, you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
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37:39 Guy Raz? Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Carlos Arake, co-founder and CEO of Quayz Energy. All right, I love this idea. It's amazing, but you're still understandably in startup mode. I mean, it's four years in. This can take who knows how long. What is the deepest hole so far that's been drilled using this technology as of today?
38:03 Speaker 01 Oh, it's in the lab, right? So we're talking about inches, a couple of inches going towards feet by the end of the year. But to do deeper than that, you actually have to build a machine that goes in the field. I'm going to tens of feet, 100 meters. Those are the ones we're building now. So we're building the machines that will allow us to do this out there, not in the lab. And, and that allows us to demonstrate that we can actually do it. We have the sites already identified, the West United States. Oregon is one of the key sites for us in Oregon. Yeah.
38:41 Guy Raz? And, and tell me, tell me about like potential timelines. When, when will you start drilling there?
38:46 Speaker 01 So 2024 is what we say we're going to do. And after that, you start the journey towards repairing a power plant. And that takes us the better part of the rest of the decade. So 2027, 28 is when we intend to repair the first power plant.
39:00 Guy Raz? So the first hole you drill is not going to be at a power plant. It's just to see if you can actually do this as quickly as you anticipate.
39:07 Speaker 01 That's right. We just want to show that we can do it. And we're going to do it with the right partners to make sure we can get a lot of expertise. So yeah.
39:15 Guy Raz? This is kind of a dumb question, but you drill that hole and then you test it to see if it produces steam. And then what do you do? Do you just like fill it back up?
39:23 Speaker 01 No, you leave it open. I mean, that hole may become part of a geothermal producing asset in the future.
39:29 Guy Raz? I see.
39:29 Speaker 01 It's very useful.
39:31 Guy Raz? You just don't want to stand over it. It'd be like standing over Old Faithful. It would just vaporize you, right?
39:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can't do that. That's dangerous. Don't do it.
39:39 Guy Raz? All right, I won't do it. Imagine standing over Old Faithful. My God, that's basically what it is, right? It's basically like a geyser at Yellowstone.
39:47 Speaker 01 A geyser? Yeah, we're creating geysers, basically, and those geysers are running power plants.
39:53 Guy Raz? All right, so now, what are the hurdles in your way to do? I mean, besides proving the technology, once you prove the technology, is it about money? Is it about the regulatory environment? Are there legal hurdles? Tell me what you have to overcome.
40:08 Speaker 01 These things take a lot of money, a lot of time. So support and capitalization is important. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars to show that this can work. So that's a big one. The other one is technology. We have to scale the technology up. That's a lot of engineering. And those things take a lot of time and effort. And the third one is making sure that the world continues to be supportive of decarbonization, right? Because if the world forgets about decarbonization, none of these things matter anymore, right? So I think all of those things will converge to clear the way and we'll succeed in repairing that power plant by the end of the decade.
40:43 Guy Raz? And what about costs? I mean, one of the things about coal, and we should mention, coal is still a huge source of electricity around the world. I mean, it is relatively cheap to mine coal. So what are the costs to do this?
41:01 Speaker 01 It has to be competitive with wind and solar and coal, right? So we're talking about one, two, three cents per kilowatt hour. And that gives you the ability to really do this systematically, no matter where you are. You know, the world will get serious about carbon taxes and that will make coal more expensive. So it works in favor of this.
41:17 Guy Raz? But in terms of the cost, I mean, the main cost here is drilling that hole down 20 kilometers.
41:24 Speaker 01 That's right. That's right. So you're going to save the fuel cost over the lifetime of that power plant, and you're going to replace it with the cost of making the geothermal field. And it's actually going to come ahead. You know, building the geothermal field is going to make more sense economically speaking than buying the coal for the next 30 years.
41:42 Guy Raz? One of the criticisms of nuclear, there's been many, right? Obviously, there are environmental concerns, safety concerns. But one of them is that it takes so long to stand up a nuclear power plant. It was just in France, and France gets a lot of its power from nuclear energy, which is amazing. But to build now nuclear power plants, it takes, could take five to 10 years to build a plant. And so we don't have enough time. What you're proposing, you could convert an existing plant in weeks.
42:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, the power plant's already built, and all we have to do is to feed it the steam that's carbon free. And you can do each one in weeks. That's precisely the play we're after. Now, there's 10,000 of them to convert around the world. So there's a lot of work to do.
42:28 Guy Raz? Now, one of the, one of the challenges with energy transition, this is among many challenges, is jobs, right? There are lots of jobs in oil and natural gas, and that's led to coal, right? It's mining coal, it's people working on oil rigs, it's the servicing, it's the, all the supply chain for oil and natural gas is enormous. I mean, in theory, or let's say in reality, could tapping into geothermal sources provide as many jobs?
42:57 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely. This is, this is very much part of the design. There's no other way to, to meet the energy transition requirements unless we're counting on those 3 million jobs that already exist in the oil and gas industry. And it's also the jobs of the power plants. You know, there's a lot of power plants with jobs, you know? Those can't continue to operate. So you said it before, this is urgent. We gotta do this very, very quickly. We cannot afford to create supply chains and workforces from scratch. Fossil fuels has a huge advantage. And if you repurpose that to geothermal, you're way ahead of the game.
43:38 Guy Raz? So let me, let me talk about, let's talk about scale for a moment because I read an interview that you gave where you mentioned that one geothermal well could potentially produce about 50 megawatts of energy. All right. And let's talk about San Francisco for, because I'm in the Bay Area. Let's talk about San Francisco. San Francisco uses about 14,000 megawatt hours of electricity every single day. So I think my math is right. You would need about 12 of these wells in San Francisco running 24 hours a day to power this, this city alone. San Francisco, which is not, not one of the biggest cities in the world by far.
44:17 Speaker 01 Your math's right. 12. Yeah, that's what it takes.
44:20 Guy Raz? Can you do that? Would you, can you, can you drill 12 20 kilometer holes just in the city of San Francisco or in its outskirts? Is that possible?
44:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. How big are these wells? They're only eight inches in diameter. So absolutely can.
44:32 Guy Raz? Oh, wow.
44:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. I don't think you can do with anything else, but you're right. It's 12 wells for that amount of energy to run San Francisco.
44:39 Guy Raz? Now, here, here's something that, and I don't, I don't, I don't understand the, the geology of this as well as you do, but one of the challenges with, you know, drilling for like shale, right? And natural gas has been the release of methane. Can you avoid that with this technology you're talking about?
44:57 Speaker 01 Ah, yes, because we're not really into methane. We're drilling way, way below that, right? So we're just really into hot, dry rock. You know, we're talking about kilometers beyond where oil and gas normally is found. So, so you're really not tapping into those resources.
45:12 Guy Raz? And is there a limit to the number of these, these wells, these holes you can drill around the world?
45:17 Speaker 01 I guess the limit is how, how many drilling rigs can we have out there doing things? But if there's any hint in the oil industry, there's millions of oil wells drilled. So, so we can drill millions of geothermal wells.
45:32 Guy Raz? So let's say in a city like New York or, or London or Tokyo, approximately, how many of these holes would you need to drill to, to generate enough geothermal energy to power that city every day?
45:45 Speaker 01 Dozens to hundreds, low hundreds. I mean, we're talking about a dozen wells producing a gigawatt. The largest cities of the world are in the tens of gigawatts. We're talking about a handful of wells. You're not talking about thousands or tens of thousands of wells to get the energy out that these cities need.
46:05 Guy Raz? Ultimately, if this really does scale, what percentage of Earth's energy needs can this provide?
46:12 Speaker 01 I think it's going to be 50% or more. So this is truly a replacement of fossil fuels. Today fossil fuels are about 2/3 of energy. We aspire to have that, but with geothermal. So the majority, certainly more than 50%.
46:29 Guy Raz? And again, forgive me for the question because I'm not a geologist, but is it infinitely abundant? I mean, at a certain point, does that heat that we drill into tap out?
46:39 Speaker 01 I get that question a lot. But think about this, the Earth has been leaking 40 terawatts, twice as much energy as we humans consume from within. It's been leaking. So whether we're here or not, whether we're tapping it or not, it's already losing a lot more energy than we need. So I don't think that's going to happen, not in a billion years. So it's truly practically infinite for all our intents and purposes.
47:05 Guy Raz? So assuming that the technology works the way you hope it will, in 20 or 30 years from now, more than half of our energy can come from geothermal sources, which is carbon free, right? It's completely, there's no carbon pollution that it generates.
47:21 Speaker 01 That is correct. It's clean energy. Yeah.
47:23 Guy Raz? Wow.
47:23 Speaker 01 So 20, 30 years, let's see. I mean, it's going to take more than 20, 30 years to re-power every single power plant and build new ones. So let's say by 2050, we have only 1 to 5 terawatts. That's probably a healthy 20% of global energy needs. But certainly after that, you know, you start talking about the majority of energy coming from here.
47:45 Guy Raz? How confident are you that the technology will work?
47:48 Speaker 01 I'm dedicating my life to it. This is what I'm doing every day of my life. So technology development is hard. You go and do it as best as you can. You build the best things you can. And that's what gives you confidence.
48:04 Speaker 01 Within we're going to succeed. We're vested in the success of this because we need to transition energy.
48:09 Guy Raz? I mean, if this works, which I hope it does, I am rooting for you, I think we all are. It could really change the world.
48:16 Speaker 01 That's exactly what we're trying to do.
48:18 Guy Raz? Carlos Araque, co-founder and CEO of Quaise Energy. Thanks so much for joining us.
48:23 Speaker 01 Thank you, Guy. Appreciate the time.
48:27 Guy Raz? Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is @howibuiltthis and mine is @GuyRaz. And on Instagram, I'm @Guy.Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected] . This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our music was composed by Rameen Arablouei. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coats.
49:12 Guy Raz? Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.
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