Harnessing geothermal energy: the startup wants to dig the world’s deepest hole for this

In 1970, Soviet scientists began an unprecedented endeavor. They wanted to dig the deepest hole on Earth to explore the composition of the Earth’s crust, thermal conditions in the deep layers of the Earth and potential deposits of previously untapped resources.

Drilling began on the Russian Kola Peninsula and after several years reached a depth of 12,262 meters. So far, the human race has never penetrated deep into the earth. However, an American startup now wants to break that record – and do so many times over.

A startup wants to make geothermal energy usable

Founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Plasma and Fusion Sciences, Quaise Energy announced in a press release that it plans to venture up to 20 kilometers underground. However, this is not an end in itself. Instead, Quaise engineers aim to harness the supercritical geothermal heat present at these depths.

In the depths of the cola well at that time Temperatures It is measured at about 180°C. In a similar project in Germany, the Continental Deep Drilling Program, in the 1990s in Windischeschenbach, Bavaria, drilling was carried out to a depth of 9,101 meters in a period of 1,468 days, measuring 265 degrees Celsius.

Quaise’s founders hope to find even higher temperatures at greater depths: 500 degrees Celsius and more. A modern geothermal power plant will be constructed around each well, which will use heat from the earth’s interior to generate electricity. Similarly, decommissioned coal-fired power plants can be converted to geothermal energy.

These power plants can achieve a theoretical output of 30 to 50 MW per well. feature? Unlike other forms of renewable energy, such a power plant may occupy much less space than, for example, a solar garden or a wind farm. There will be no lulls due to cloudy skies or no wind. In addition, such a well and a power plant can be built almost anywhere in the world.

Just melt the underground rocks

In order to be able to drill at depths of more than ten kilometers – and to do so as quickly as possible – the engineers at the company, which began in 2018, are developing new types of drilling tools that use technology already used in the field of fusion research. Drilling should be done with rotary drill heads and gyrotron.

The latter is a machine that generates high-frequency microwaves used to heat plasma in research reactors such as Wendelstein 7-X and the future ITER to several million degrees Celsius. Quaise hopes to be able to melt easily through this technique. The drill head is designed to break up materials before they hit them.

Quaise wants to test its drilling technology as early as 2024. It is not yet known when the first 20-kilometer hole can be drilled. But the startup is currently hoping to commercialize its technology around 2028 and get its first power plant up and running. It is then scheduled to open more power plants with its own wells around the world. The pits themselves should be completely unremarkable. Advancement to a depth of 20 kilometers should only take 100 days.

This article was written by Michael Fortch