US-based company plans to use microwaves to tap into deep thermal energy sources

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. QuaiseEnergy says that the total energy content of the heat stored underground exceeds our annual energy demand by a factor of a billion.

A US-based company is developing technology to blast rock with microwaves to potentially drill the deepest holes on earth. The end goal is to access sources of deep thermal energy.

“If we can get to ten miles down, we can start to find economic temperatures everywhere. And if we go even deeper, we can get to temperatures where water [pumped to the site] becomes supercritical, a steam-like phase that will allow a step change improvement in the power production per well and so cheapen the cost of energy,” he said.

“And the truth is we’ll need hundreds if not thousands of Kola boreholes if we want to scale geothermal to the capacity that’s needed,” Houde said. “Quaise is working to replace conventional drill bits with millimeter wave energy. Those millimeter waves literally melt then vaporize the rock to create ever-deeper holes.”He noted that the general technique was developed at MIT over the last 15 years. Scientists demonstrated that millimeter waves could indeed drill a hole in basalt.

 

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