Quaise Energy Launches New Interactive Map to Explore the LCOE of Superhot Geothermal
Underneath one human footprint is enough clean energy to power 20,000 homes. It’s true everywhere on Earth, regardless of your continent or hemisphere. That’s the real potential of geothermal energy.
Geothermal is the most promising source of clean energy on Earth but is massively underutilized today. Geography, technology, and economics form a trifecta of limitations. In the United States, geothermal power is currently only viable in western states. Nobody is running a geothermal power plant east of New Mexico.
Our new Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) calculator and interactive map show, for the first time, how superhot geothermal developed with millimeter wave drilling opens the floodgates. The technology makes geothermal more accessible and cost-effective across the United States. And our LCOE white paper explains the metric to better contextualize the costs from the calculator.
The LCOE calculator and map allow you to compare projected costs at varying well depths and temperatures, when using millimeter wave drilling, anywhere in the contiguous United States. Quaise offers the only solution to break the trifecta of geothermal barriers. No other approach could make geothermal energy cost-competitive, or even possible, east of the Mississippi.
However, our work only begins in the United States. The challenge of making clean energy abundant and affordable is a global one, especially when other options run short.
Weather-dependent renewables like wind and solar suffer from intermittency and significant land use. What’s needed are solutions at the scale of fossil fuels, which still account for over 80% of the global energy supply, but without the carbon externality.
Clean, firm generation is essential to produce power at any time of day without any emissions. Nuclear power can do so via fission and fusion. Fission has been around for decades but must deal with global geopolitics. Fusion has been promised for decades but is still a work in progress. Which leaves geothermal as the only true global option on the table.
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The only way for geothermal to become a dominant energy source is to go hotter and deeper.
Today, geothermal merely contributes a decimal point to the global energy supply. The only way for geothermal to become a dominant energy source is to go hotter and deeper —hotter to produce up to 10x more power per well and deeper to dramatically expand geographic access worldwide.
Plus, the hotter you go, the better the economics. The graphs generated by the LCOE calculator show that geothermal costs fall continuously until reaching 300-400 C, at which point they optimize and level out. Conventional geothermal wells, at less than 300 C, are missing out on significant cost savings and production potential.
For instance, one superhot geothermal production well can replace up to ten conventional geothermal wells. Even more remarkable, one superhot geothermal production well can produce as much energy as the vast majority of oil and gas wells, allowing geothermal to reach economic and power parity with oil and gas.
The Quaise LCOE calculator visualizes this vast potential of superhot geothermal. The interactive map and companion data reveal how truly underutilized the resource is in the United States and, consequently, worldwide. It’s time to take geothermal to the next level—from a global energy decimal point to its dominant position as the workhorse of the energy transition ahead.
The costs provided by the calculator reflect N’th-of-a-kind costs, meaning they are not what our first project will cost; rather, they are the costs that can be achieved once we scale the technology. The costs are in line with Lazard’s LCOE estimates for geothermal, showing that geothermal is the lowest-cost clean firm generator.
The calculator is built on physics models developed in-house and used for commercial development. The geologic data is based on an interpretation of Stanford’s Temperature Model
projected down to 20 kilometers.
Energy is everything. At Quaise, we look at the big picture to see where the world is and where it needs to go. Today, fossil fuels still dominate global energy by a long shot. A smoother transition to clean energy requires a bold new vision grounded in science, scale, and speed. Join us as we explore the future of energy and the power of deep geothermal.