We’ve made a lot of progress over the years, but this marks a significant step on our path to superhot geothermal power production. Last month, we demonstrated millimeter wave drilling outside of the lab for the very first time.
To put that in perspective, it was only three years ago that our team started testing with millimeter waves. We took those early learnings from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and set up a humming campus here in Houston. We reached our 100x target in 2023 and tested at higher power throughout 2024. Now, we’re drilling under the open sky.
Millimeter wave drilling is the keystone of superhot geothermal. It’s the only way to access the resource at scale while reaching economic and power parity with fossil fuels. Over the coming months, two more drilling field tests will pave the way to our first commercial developments.
Video Transcript
Henry Phan: "I keep this tiny little rock here, no bigger than a grain of sand, as a reminder of how far we’ve come.
It was just over three years ago that we started testing with millimeter waves at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Millimeter wave drilling is not the same as normal drilling; we use direct energy to melt and vaporize rock.
Our work to advance millimeter wave drilling builds on a decade of fundamental research done at MIT. Yet our engineers were not able to see any of the testing at MIT due to the COVID lockdown. So when we started, we didn't know the difference between this and a vaporized particle.
But we knew that if we can get this thing to work out in the field, it would change the future of energy. Millimeter wave drilling is the key to building hotter, deeper, and more powerful geothermal energy all around the world. And that’s the future that we’re building toward.
So we took what we learned at Oak Ridge National Lab and applied it to our engineering facility here in Houston to further scale the technology. In 2023, we hit our 100x target of a 1” diameter hole at 100” deep. And in 2024, we acquired a higher power gyrotron, showing that we can make a 4” hole at 40” deep.
Over the past year, we’ve been perfecting the recipe to give us the confidence to go test outside for the very first time.
Now, we’re testing everything right outside our Houston facility to validate all the systems and to make sure the equipment is fully functional. This is the first time anyone has pointed millimeter waves into the ground to make a hole.
The next step on our path to geothermal power is to pack everything up and conduct a larger-scale field trial on the other side of Texas.
We’ll see you there!"