Quaise drills 100m into granite with millimeter-wave beam, no drill bit

Quaise Energy says it has bored 100 meters into hard granite at a Central Texas test site using a gyrotron-powered millimeter-wave beam that vaporizes rock instead of grinding through it with a mechanical bit. The approach, spun out of more than a decade of MIT research, eliminates downhole hardware entirely — a meaningful distinction, since conventional bits wear out fast in the hot, hard rock that dominates the deep crust. Before this year the technique had only reached a few centimeters in a lab, so going from centimeters to 100 meters in the field is the company’s main claim to progress.

The milestone is more demonstration than deployment. 100 meters is a sliver of the depth needed to tap the superhot rock — roughly 400°C / 752°F — that makes this kind of geothermal commercially interesting, and the granite drilled here is the same basement rock that blankets much of the crust, which is the point: prove the beam works on the hard stuff. Quaise’s next step is a gyrotron with ten times the power, building toward a pilot power plant in the Western U.S. as early as 2028.

The pitch is that millimeter-wave ablation is the only practical way to reach next-generation geothermal heat at scale, and CEO Carlos Araque is framing it as opening a new energy frontier. The depth and economics still have to be proven, but the field test moves the technology out of the lab and onto a full-scale rig, having earlier run an initial demo on a Nabors oil rig.