Quaise holds public demonstration of millimeter wave technology for geothermal drilling
Quaise Energy hosted a public demonstration of their millimeter wave drilling technology as the company tests it against increasingly challenging scenarios.
Just a few months after achieving a milestone of having drilled through 100 meters of granite, Quaise Energy hosted the first of several planned public demonstrations of their boundary-pushing millimeter wave geothermal drilling technology. Some 56 invited public observers gathered in Marble Falls in Texas to see the drilling process in action.
For Quaise Energy, this represents the latest entry in a series of progressively more challenging demonstrations of their technology. As Justin Lamb, Head of Operations recounted, “Last fall we started by drilling four feet into a granite core inside our Houston lab. Then we moved right outside the lab to drill ten feet into another granite core.” In May of this year, the company drilled 40 feet (~12.2 meters) into a granite core on a full-scale oil rig just outside of Houston owned by Nabors.
A public showcase of the technology
At the recent public demonstration, the observers were able to see the drilling process in action, including the real-time drilling data. They are also able to see and touch the samples of the ablated granite, which were effectively turned into grey ash. Most importantly, they were able to see down the drilled hole through a live video camera – the deepest borehole drilling using millimeter waves so far.
The company is hosting six more public demonstrations the Marble Falls quarry over the next three months.
Other milestones reached
There were also other notable observations made during the demo. The drilling rate reached a rate of up to five meters per hour, which the team described as “extremely fast.”
Henry Phan, Vice President of Engineering at Quaise, explained that today’s commercial operations average a drilling rate of a tenth of a meter per hour through granite. He also, however, pointed out that the hole diameter at Marble Falls was 4 inches, while the actual goal for production borehole diameter should be 8.5 inches.
According to CEO Carlos Araque, it aims to break its own drilling record by drilling ten times as deep, to one kilometer. This could take place within the next few months.
The Quaise team continues to do additional tests to optimize specific parts of the process. “We’ll experiment with various parameters to, for example, control how straight the hole is and see if we can go even faster,” said Emilie Williams, Test Group Manager at Quaise.
Source: EurekAlert
