Amid all the talk about renewable and clean energy, a company formed in 2020 named Quaise has managed to raise US$63 million in funding to jumpstart its endeavor to drill deeper into the Earth's crust than any entity has done before.

The end goal of Quaise's ambitious drilling project is to harness the planet's geothermal energy, which could end up becoming a giant source of renewable power if done correctly.

Today, there has been plenty of debate surrounding the upsides of using solar, wind, and hydro-derived power, although many have tended to overlook the potential of using the heat stored deep inside the Earth to provide a widespread renewable source of energy.

Of course, there has been a good reason for this hesitation, considering that it has been a huge technological challenge so far for companies to access geothermal hot rocks buried deep in the planet's crust. So far, mankind's best efforts at digging deep into the Earth have maxed out at around 12.3 kilometers deep (managing to go so far has been nothing short of impressive in itself), although it's not been enough for us to effectively harness the planet's heat on a massive scale.

Now, Quaise thinks that it can go one better by combining current drilling methods with the power of a megawatt-power beam generator, also known as a gyrotron. This device is inspired by nuclear fusion, and generates electromagnetic waves in the milimeter-wave portion of the spectrum that can – in layman terms – theoretically burn through the toughest and hottest rocks that make it difficult to drill really deep into the planet's crust.

Quaise thinks that this solution could possibly allow its machines, within just months, to pierce through to depths as low as 20 kilometers, where the heat of surrounding rocks can reach temperatures of up to 500 degrees Celsius.

This amount of heat will be able to quickly transform any liquid water pumped down into those depths into a supercritical vapor-like state (having the low viscosity of gas and the high density of liquid), which is suitable for generating electricity when put into turbines and generators.

In easy-to-understand terms, this would equate to producing and harnessing the power of steam, but amplified considerably.

The funding received so far by Quaise has allowed its chiefs to become confident of having working proof-of-concept devices ready within the next two years, with a full working system producing energy by 2026 should all go swimmingly.

In 2028, the company also hopes that it'll be able to start taking over old coal-fuel power stations and convert them into steam-powered units instead.

These ambitions are currently still things that can be considered pipe dreams, and only time will tell whether or not Quaise's implementation of their technology will end up succeeding.

But in the grand scheme of things, it really does seem as though it's all worth at least a try.

Currently, only less than half a percent (yes, below 0.5 percent) of the world's energy is derived from geothermal sources. This is in stark contrast to how much our usage of such a source should be growing – the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that geothermal energy should be growing at around 13 percent a year if we are to reach net zero emissions by 2050, although the current rate of growth is way below that margin.

If anything, harnessing the heat of the planet for electricity really should be something considered more often when it comes to the discussion of renewable energy, and we can only hope that Quaise (or any other relevant company) can come up with something workable within the near future.

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Cover image sourced from Salon.com and New Atlas.