- The startup which is potentially known as Quaise picked up $40 million funding last month.
- The money will be taken forward with fusion technology for drilling the holes in the depth
- The concept of fusion drill tapping into the Earth for bountiful, clear energy is calm.
An MIT spinoff has secured, safe and important funding for a project that will use the fusion power tech to drill 12 miles into the earth and harvest the massive energy down there.
A spin-off from MIT Quaise claims it will employ hijacked fusion technology to drill the world’s deepest holes, releasing clean, almost infinite supercritical geothermal energy that can re-power fossil-fueled power plants throughout the planet.
As the reports released, Quaise get the $40 million in series funding last month and the money is raising forward its efforts to leverage fusion technology to drill one of the deepest holes of all time.
Mark Cupta, managing director at Prelude Ventures and one of the investors in the company, said that we need to have a huge amount of carbon-free energy for upcoming decades.
Further, he said, Quaise Energy is one of the most resource-efficient and nearly indefinitely scalable ways for generating energy for our world. Â Quaise Energy provides the ideal complement to our present renewable energy sources, allowing us to achieve long-term baseload reliability.
The heat beneath our feet
We all know that; the Earth’s core is hot but there is also a chance that the scale of it still has the power to surprise. The temperature in the core is the iron and estimated to be around 5,200-degree Celsius, generated heat from the radioactive elements decaying combining with the heat that still remains from the very formations of the planet. Also, when a swirling cloud of gas and dust was crushed into a ball by its own gravity, it was a cataclysmic occurrence.
The deepest holes aren’t deep enough
If we could drip enough, we could put the geothermal power stations just about anywhere we wanted them. But it’s more difficult than it appears. The thickness of the Earth’s crust ranges from around 5 to 75 kilometers like 3 to 47 miles, with the thinnest regions being far out in the deep ocean.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole is the deepest hole humanity has ever excavated. This Russian project near the Norwegian border began in 1970 with the goal of perforating the crust all the way down to the mantle. In 1989, one of its boreholes reached a vertical depth of 12,289 m (40,318 ft), before the team concluded it was impractical to proceed any further and ran out of money.
Direct Energy drilling
Where the limitations become much more complex for drill bits to operate, researchers have been testing the capabilities of directed energy beams to heat, melt, fracture, and vaporize basement rock in a process that is identified as spallation.
What is a gamechanger here?
Besides the excellent sci-fi-sounding methods, the use of fusion tech to get these ultra-deep holes could provide notable advantages. Like the traditional drill bits are limited with the distance before the hot temperatures, gasses and liquids prevent them from going into the next steps.
Also, Quaise would use a machine which is identified as the gyrotron, and it typically used to create millimeter electromagnetic waves. It helps to superheat plasma in fusion reactors. Instead of plasma, the startup would point at the ground and drill into it with the help of energy beams.
The technology has the capability to take drilling to previously unimagined depths. This might theoretically allow individuals to tap into geothermal energy from the Earth no matter where they are on the planet.
