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See the 15-slide pitch deck that sold Vinod Khosla on a clean-energy startup that converts fossil-fuel plants into clean ones
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- Quaise Energy wants to covert fossil-fuel power plants into clean ones by drilling deep into the planet.
- The cofounders came up with the concept based on the work of MIT engineers.
- Now Quaise Energy has raised $52 million in venture capital to build prototypes in the field.
Quaise Energy wants to fast-track the world’s conversion to renewable energy by using geothermal energy as a bridge, its founder, Carlos Araque, said.
The startup is building millimeter-wave drilling systems to access Earth’s deeper geothermal-power sources and has caught the attention of the venture-capital heavyweight Vinod Khosla, who personally invested $1 million in Quaise Energy’s seed round.
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Now Quaise Energy has gone on to raise a $52 million Series A round with participation from Prelude Ventures, MIT’s venture fund, The Engine, and Safar Partners. The company is developing equipment to conduct tests on the ground to go 100 and then 1,000 meters deep into the planet, Araque said.
“We need something like 50 trillion watts of power to run the world by 2050, but no one technology actually gets us there,” Araque said. “Fusion and geothermal are the only two energy sources that help us reach that goal.”
Araque knows a thing or two about how oil and gas energy works: He studied mechanical engineering at MIT and built tools and new technology to streamline oil and gas drilling at the oil company Schlumberger before he had an epiphany about the scale of the climate crisis and wanted to spearhead the change to sustainable energy, he said.
“I saw that the energy transition was going to happening our lifetime, and it was an enormous opportunity and challenge,” Araque said.
“We have to shift our entire energy system in a generation — it’s unthinkable,” he added.
Araque leveraged his connections within MIT to work with the fusion scientist Paul Woskov, who realized there was a business opportunity in repurposing this fusion technology to drill deeper into Earth’s surface to tap into geothermal-energy sources. Woskov’s team had been working on this engineering problem for 10 years, and it established that the science was sound and worked perfectly under lab conditions, Araque said.
Araque and his cofounder, Matthew Houde, decided to team up to build a startup to scale this technology, and Quaise Energy was born. The team set out to convert old fossil-fuel power plants into clean-energy plants by retooling them to drill for geothermal power instead of oil and gas because the underlying principles of steam turbines work in the same way, regardless of whether the energy source is burning fossil fuels or geothermal heat. Quaise Energy hopes to use the new funding to take the drilling technology out of the research lab and test it in the field.
“Suppose everything goes according to plan for three years, and we’ll move on to making a geothermal field and then making geothermal fields next to power plants to fit the steam to the power plant,” he said.
It also means that fossil-fuel companies will become partners in the shift to renewable energy, Araque said, something he’s personally passionate about.
“I think it would be a mistake not to involve them — the only industry putting a terrawatt of energy on Earth is oil and gas,” he added.
“We can’t succeed in the energy transition if we have to create a whole new infrastructure from scratch,” he said.
Check out the 15-slide pitch deck Quaise Energy used to raise $52 million.
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