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Matt Houde, co-founder of Quaise Energyit is absolutely certain that the solution to have clean energy always available handy resides in high performance drills.
On the occasion of TEDX Boston Planetary Stewardship Event, held week in conjunction with COP27 in Egypt in order to “to highlight actionable ideas for human activity to achieve a sustainable relationship with the planet’s natural systems”Houde explained why the deep geothermal (over 400 meters deep) has so much potential: “The total energy content of the heat stored underground exceeds our annual energy demand as a planet by a factor of a billion. So tapping into a fraction of that is more than enough to meet our energy needs for the foreseeable future.”
However, the technology has a hitch “We can’t dig deep enough yet to unlock that energy…If we can get 10 miles down [ndr ~ 16mila m], we can start to find cheap temperatures everywhere. And if we go even deeper, we can get to temperatures where the water [pompata nel sito] becomes supercritical, [una fase simile al vapore, che consente] a gradual improvement in energy production per well and therefore a reduction in the cost of energy.”
Deepest hole drilled to date, the Kola well in Russia, is 7.6 miles (about 12,262 meters) and it took 20 years to complete because conventional equipment like power drill bits break at those depths.
“The truth is, we will need hundreds if not thousands of Kola wells if we are going to scale geothermal to needed capacity”added Houde, explaining how Quaise is developing a technology to literally blast rock with microwaves in order to drill – potentially – the deepest holes on Earth.
“…And no, I’m not stealing a Star Trek plot device. This technology is real and has already been proven!”.
The company is conducting a search for replace conventional spikes with millimeter wave energy – cousins of conventional microwaves – with which to be able melt and vaporize the rock to create ever deeper holes.
In the last 15 years some scientists, in a controlled environment at an MIT laboratoryproved that millimeter waves are capable of drill a hole in the basalt with an aspect ratio of 1:1 and 2 inches deep by 2 inches in diameter (about 5x5cm) .
Based on data from MIT, Quasie has increased the millimeter wave beam power density and hole depth by a factor of 10 to get an aspect ratio 10:1.
At the basis of this innovation there is a gyrotron machine, which generates millimeter-wave energy, used for about 70 years in nuclear fusion research. Together with millimeter waves, Quaise will also use conventional drilling technologies developed by the oil and gas industry to excavate the first layers “Millimeter waves are ideal for the hard, hot, crystalline rock at depth that conventional drilling struggles with. They are not as efficient in the softer rock closer to the surface, where conventional drilling excels.”.
There are still several challenges Quaise faces in perfecting her technology, including a better understanding of rock properties at great depths. Furthermore, Houde stated, “we need to advance the gyrotron supply chain” and the waveguides that carry their energy to the downhole.
Such equipment it is currently optimized for one-off projects specialized in fusion research but, in view of deep geothermal applications, they will need to be produced in quantity and be robust and reliable in the field.
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