94: Carlos Araque | Could Quaise Capture 20% Of The Worlds Electricity?

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/carlos-araque/

Carlos Araque, the Co-Founder and CEO of Quaise.

Quaise Energy are on a singular mission to dig deeper holes than we have ever dug before. Carlos is one of the best communicators of the promise, potential and limitations of geothermal energy in the world. Hands down.

Carlos is a physicist at heart. He hails from Colombia and holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT. Carlos spent 14 years in oil and gas mastering the art of digging holes and extracting the earth’s nutrients before he launched, 4 years ago, the magnificent company we profile in this podcast, Quaise Energy. 

In This Podcast With Carlos Araque, You Can Expect To Hear About…

• A first-principles response comparing the per-unit cost of energy across all different sources.
• How transformational could a Quaise breakthrough be to the world?
• The bearish case for geothermal.
• + Elon Musk.

Jump In On My Newsletter 📋 🔑 - https://atlasgeographica.com/subscribe
📷 Instagram & Twitter 🐦 
-----

• 00:00 – Introduction.
• 04:03 – Vaclav Smil Energy & Civilisation.
• 10:38 – Where Does The Earth’s Heat Come From?
• 14:09 – Understanding Different Energy Cost Per Unit.
• 25:52 – Quaise Business Model & The Engineering Problem They Are Solving.
• 35:43 – Legacy, JD Rokeffler & Potential For Geothermal Changing The World.
• 48:13 – The Total Addressable Market For Quaise.
• 55:19 – How Much Progress Has Quaise Made & What Makes Them So Innovative?
• 1:04:53 – How Geothermal Ubiquitousness Would Change Geopolitics.
• 1:10:00 – Daniel Yergin & The Bearish Case For Geothermal.
• 1:16:43 – What Is A Country You Are Bullish On?
• 1:19:19 – Conversation Between Any Two People Of History.
• 1:24:18 – Afterthoughts & Ambition For The Podcast.

-----

Related Episodes Of The Curious Worldview Podcast

• John Redfern | CEO of Eavor
• Magnus Brandberg | VC In Geothermal
• Patrick Hanson | The Power & Potential Of Geothermal Energy
• David Volts | Vox & Geothermal

Links To Carlos Araque

• Quaise Energy

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The following is a conversation with Carlos Araque, the co-founder and CEO of Quaze. Quays are on a singular mission to dig deeper holes than we've ever dug before. So yes, dear listener, this is yet another episode about geothermal energy, but don't think just because you've heard the one that you've heard them all. Because Carlos is truly one of the best communicators of the promised potential and limitations of geothermal energy in the world. And it was actually Quaze and their romantic positioning of geothermal that reignited an excitement within me for this renewable energy. I discovered geothermal back in 2020 when I heard um Robert Friedland, the CEO of Ivanhoe Minds, communicate it so crisply. But then I looked around the internet and saw that there was genuinely nothing uh further to read about it except for some maybe niche obscure academics. But there wasn't money and exciting businesses and exciting entrepreneurs and exciting media media that was giving it a lot of attention. And so I chalked up uh Robert Friedland's hype and he's superbly delivered a pitch for geothermal energy um as hype. And then I just quickly forgot about it. But then something to do with Quaze came across my desk, and after visiting the Quaze website and reading that their mission statement was to replace every single oil and gas well with a supercritical geothermal well providing the same amount of energy, I thought, holy shit, that's the revolutionary geothermal I remember being so excited about. And then suddenly the geothermal was for me impossible again. And that then led down the path of me interviewing Patrick Hansen, Magnus Brandenberg, and John Ranfern on the subject of geothermal energy, who all three of them have a unique position within the geothermal industry to look at it from. Which then led us to today, uh, which is the interview with Carlos. Carlos is a physicist at heart. He hails from Colombia, more specifically Medellin, and holds both a bachelor's and master's degree in mechanical engineering from the Sanctified MIT. Carlos spent 14 years in oil and gas, mastering the art of digging holes and extracting the earth's nutrients from them. Then four years ago, he launched a magnificent company that we profile today, quasi and energy. Specifically in this podcast, you can expect to hear about some of the following. A first principal's response is comparing the per unit cost of energy across all the different sources. This is a full accounting measure of all the trade-offs involved with each source of energy. And truly, this is something that deserves a whole podcast to itself. Carlos's answer was magnificent, and I do encourage any of you guys listening, if you know someone who could speak on this subject with authority, please do let me know, because it's something I would love to learn more about. Um as well in this podcast, you can expect to hear about Carlos responding to how transformational a quase breakthrough would be to the world and to society should they achieve their ambition. Because this is the thing that gets me so excited about geothermal energy, about Eva Technology, about Quase Energy, is that if these guys realize their ambition, they do more than just capture an existing market, which is in itself an amazing proposition. But they create cheaper, more ubiquitously available energy for the entire planet. The downstream effects of that are impossible for us to know. So it's truly revolutionary stuff. As well, you can hear in this podcast uh Carlos responding to the bearish case of the geothermal. And then as well at the end of the conversation, Carlos uh speaks a little bit about uh Elon Musk. So this was a special episode for me, considering that Carlos's messaging was the very thing that got me back into geothermal. Um, and so do please hang around to the conclusion of the podcast to hear my afterthoughts and as well for me to explain my ambition for this podcast. And finally, with no further ado, here is Carlos Adakir. You said in an interview that Vaklav Smil, Energy and Civilization was required reading. So I wanted to start by asking you this: how do you think of yourself, and then of Quays, how you might feature in a future edition of that book, should you realize the ambition that you have set out for yourself? Because up until the eve of the shale gas revolution, the whole world thought that this George Mitchell guy was a fool, certain to fail his impossible dream. But years later, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that his innovation generated trillions of dollars. It uprooted industries, and very interestingly, I think, with your proposition as well, it changed geopolitics.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

It did. Big time. So I think I think geothermal is very similar in that regard. So the kind of thing that we know it's there, like shale oil was known to be there. It's a question of accessing and economically extracting this energy source. And if when I read Backlash's meal, when I read many authors who think heavily about energy transition, I see that geothermal is always missing from the picture. You know, it's mentioned in a paragraph somewhere. Oh, yeah, this thing too, and that's such a such an irony. I mean, if you if you just look at the numbers, the amount of energy represented by the earth and its thermal content, it's second to only the energy available in the sun as a star, only second to that. So here we are contorting and trying to do the impossible to get clean energy and transition away from fossil fuels when all we need to do is to go a little bit deeper and a little bit hotter. We're talking about 3 to 12 miles, it's the closest you've ever been to infinite clean energy. It's like a trip to the grocery. You can walk it, you can run these distances. Uh, but we we don't look in the direction, so it's it is a wonderful opportunity. I am new to geothermal, I'm an oil and gas person, so so by no means you know, this is not growing with me forever. I had to come to terms with um many of the things we're gonna be talking about today. Convincing myself that this was meaningful, that this was worth doing, and convincing the world at large this is meaningful and it is worth doing. So I like to see in 10, 20, 30 years from now, not something specifically about glazer myself, but something about geothermal. Something that says, hey, geothermal was one of the key answers to energy transition, and here we are. We just like Shale, we didn't see it coming, but it came and it changed everything.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

And not only did Shale change everything, you could say that it maybe shifted the trajectory a little bit and maybe made the U and particularly benefited a number of countries, but wasn't this sort of global shift. The promise of geothermal is actually significantly bigger than the um you know the promise of shale, right? Because it's this energy source that is at enough depth seemingly available everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Yeah, I I think so. It's it's more global, and it doesn't involve active supply chains. You can you can I'm exp I'm gonna explain that in a second. You know, uh you could think that you know oil is oil and gas is a very interesting uh resource because not only does it represent a lot of energy, but it's also it also represents a very efficient way to carry that energy. You can pipe it, you can liquefy it, ship it across the ocean, and and you can really cover the globe. But geothermal is different. I mean, it's it's already there where you need it. So you don't need to ship it, you don't need to do anything to it, you just need to tap it and use it at point of use. You can be close to load centers, you can be close to industrial centers, to uh electricity uh generating power plants, heat um power plants, uh, and you can use it right at point of use. So it really changes the dialogue about geopolitics to a radical extreme because once you build it, you have it and you have full control. There's no fuels, there's no waste, and there's nothing anybody else can do once it's built to actually disrupt your access from that resource. And it's global, it's truly everywhere. So we're not talking about in some places there is oil, no, no, everywhere in the world there's heat guaranteed, zero uncertainty about that. In some places, a little bit deeper than others, but we're talking about three to twelve miles, that's the range. We're not talking about twenty, a hundred miles, two hundred miles, a thousand miles. The planet is six, it's four thousand miles thick, right? So we're talking about the the basic, you know, the the the first layer, it's almost like the wax on an apple, right? That's really what we're talking about. The wax on an apple, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Could you could you confirm whether this is the case? I heard it described as the thin layer of milk that might congeal if you were to heat up milk on a saucepan, which I'm sure you've done. Is that a comparable scale of what just the crust of the earth might be?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

So the crust that the earth to the center is probably for it's it's about 4,000 miles, and we're talking about 10 miles. So 10 miles, 1% of 4,000 is uh 40 miles, so it's a quarter of 1%, right? So it's um yeah, it's it's it's you know, in an apple, maybe it's a little bit more than the wax, it's maybe the skin or a little bit more than the skin. Uh, and if you're talking about a basketball, maybe it's it's a little bit more than the ridges of the basketball, right? But but it's it's but you're really not gouging it. You're really it's it's just what's on the surface. Uh on a on a golf bowl, it's not even the the depth of the dimples, right? The dimples are much deeper than one percent of the diameter of a golf ball. So, so yeah, we're talking about something very superficial.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Yeah. So could you then uh just briefly explain uh to me and and the audience why the heat is even there in the first place, and also what makes it so for all intents and purposes, functionally infinite? Where does this heat come from and why does it continue to surface outwards?

SPEAKER_01 10:56

So it comes from two sources, uh, roughly in equal parts. So the first source is when the Earth first formed, you know, by aggregation of mass from the nascent solar systems, that's called accretion, the accretion of the planet coming together. Uh you can imagine the massive bombardments that implies, you know, planet size or continent-sized pieces of rock coming together and and congealing together. So that stuff's hot, you know, it's molten rock, and little by little it starts to cool down, right? So the first part to cool down is of course the surface, you know, and that's what we call the crust. That's where we live, it solidifies into a hard shell. And that harsh shell, interesting, is an insulator. It's almost like a jacket that keeps the heat inside from leaking too fast out. So over a billion years, four billion years, which we think is the age of the planet, you know, it's been hot since the beginning and it's just been cooling slowly out. Now it's cooling at 40 terawatts, you know, 40 trillion joules per second. That's the rate at which it's cooling, yet it's been doing so for billions of years, and it will continue to do so for billions of years, and it will barely lose uh 1% of its heat. You know, I've heard people making estimates that the sun will stop shining before the earth loses all of its remnant heat. So that's the first part of the heat, right? It's there, it's been there, it's leaking out. The other part is that a lot of that mass inside the planet is radioactive. Uh there's traces of radioactivity, and that itself generates heat. Um, so that keeps it generating. So in some way you could think it's almost like a nuclear fission reactor, not a fusion, but a fission reactor. But it's perhaps the safest one we can possibly conceive because it's already encapsulated. So that's where this energy is coming from. And and it's it's leaking, it's leaking twice as fast as humans' total energy use amounts to, um, whether we are there or not, it's leaking like that, and it's going to continue to do this for billions of years. It's been doing that, and it will continue to do that for billions of years. Did you say 40 terawatts uh per year? It will leak. So 40 terawatts is a measure of uh energy flow per unit of time. So it means that it's leaking 40 terajoules per second. That is 40 terawatts. 40 trillion joules per second, every second, of every day, of every year, of a billion years plus. 40 trillion jewels, and to put that into perspective, that's a big number, but to put that into perspective, humans in totality today in the 21st century, flying planes, shipping across the ocean, putting things in space, we consume half of that, all energy in half of that. So the earth already leaks more energy than we consume in totality. Now we're not gonna tap into all of that, but we tap into a portion of that, and that's how we power civilization.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

You I I have heard you say that the whole world, we consume about 20 terawatts um of energy per year. Was that right? Not per year.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

So uh power is not um, it's already built in, it already has a built-in unit of time in it. So you can think of terawatt hours, and that's amount of energy, or you can think of terawatts, which is the flow of energy per unit of time. So when I'd say that the world consumes 20 terawatts, it means that right now there's 20 terawatts flowing, and in the next second, there's 20 terawatts flowing, and the next and the next, and the next, and the next. So it's not something that you tie to a year, it's something that you tie to all the time every single time. Now, people talk about megawatt hours or joules, and that that's how you can tie it to a year. So if you wanted to know how many terawatt hours per year the world consumes, all you have to do is to multiply the 20 terawatts by 8,760 hours in a year. That number, uh, what is that number? Is that like 160 petawatt hours? That's what it takes to run the world.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

You're the physicist, mate. I'm not doing that math off the top of my head.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Okay, you're asking the questions.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

I'm gonna ask you. However, I in fact, you know, I I I love um something else you said in one of your interviews, uh, and I just want to find the quote. You said um because I get the sense that you're a very sort of it's a cliche to say, but a first principles thinker. You know, you're less interested in the uh emotions of can we do it, should we do it, is it is it a good thing to do? Oh, look, no one's done it before, look how much money it's gonna cost, versus you just say, Does the physics let you do it? If yes, move forward, if not, don't even try it. And perhaps it's that type of attitude that allows you to just simply make that calculation, guys. Twice the energy usage currently just floats away into the atmosphere, or maybe it's not the atmosphere, I don't know, but every second. Why don't we instead of spending trillions and trillions of dollars trying to capture wind, which is fickle, trying to um dig up more carbon from the depths of the earth to offset our carbon cycle, which is also fickle? Why don't we just try and tap some of this stuff which is already coming out?

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Yeah. So so I am I am a very first principled person. That was my education at MIT. It taught me to do that. Uh, but you could find the equivalent person to me in Wien or Solar or any other sources, and they could make the same arguments, they could say things like, hey, every second of every day, the Earth receives about 140,000 terawatts, that's a lot more than geothermal. You know, of course that's the answer. So it really doesn't have to do with the magnitude of the resources. All we need to know is that the resources are fast and they can tap into it, but it's it's more nuanced than that. And these are some of the things I mentioned in some of the podcasts that you may have heard is that can we actually do it without major consequences, right? Can we truly tap that much solar to power civilization or wind or geothermal or nuclear or a combination of them? Can we truly what are the trade-offs? And that takes you away from these numbers we're talking about, and it takes you into the practicalities of how much land do we have and what do we want to use it for? How much minerals can we access and what do we want to use them for? And I think those are better arguments to make, you know. The enormity of solar, the enormity of wind, the enormity of geothermal, they all have plenty to power civilization. But some things are going to have very different consequences than others. And to me, our thinking should take us into that direction. What are those consequences and how do we do the best job we can possibly? And we can get into the details of those.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

I I wonder, this could be an unfair question, but on that vein there, have you done sort of a cost per unit of energy calculation, say social cost, but also physical cost of say, you know, one unit of energy of solar versus one unit of energy of geothermal, should you solve the engineering problem which Quase is trying to solve? Just because when I hear that answer from you, thinking of it in a first principles uh perspective, it's really a question of the best trade-off for society. How can we access the cleanest energy at kind of the cheapest rate, but also at the least cost to you know, a giant extra net? Yeah, precisely. Because you know, if you're gonna you could sun, I mean, you've everyone's seen photos of it, you could sun a tiny little village in Western Australia, capture all of that sun, and wow, look, we just captured all the energy the world needs. But there's obviously huge limitations to that. Um, so I wonder have you done that, those sort of cost per unit of energy calculations across the different types of energy?

SPEAKER_01 19:16

We we have, absolutely, we have, and we we don't do it ourselves, we rely on the best literature out there. Um, Backlasmith is one of the best people at this, right? So that's why I always mention his his literature because it really helps you understand the numbers. But we've done it, and we we always think of four dimensions, you know. When we made this argument, especially when I made this argument to investors, why bother doing this if we have wind and solar? Well, I have to get into the details of those four. They are the land intensity per unit of energy, how much land does it take for solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc. etc. etc. Second, material intensity per unit of energy, how many tons of steel or concrete or copper or nickel or cobalt or rare earths, etc. etc. do you need for wind, solar, etc. etc. Third one, this is social, this is socioeconomics, labor intensity, and that's an odd one. You know, nobody talks too much about that one, but per unit of energy, how many man hours does it take to procure? And that's important because if you think about civilization emerging, it happens because fewer of us had to worry about procuring the food for the rest of us. So the labor intensity of things actually matters. Um, and the fourth one has to do with the carbon intensity, which is the one everybody focuses on. How many uh per unit of energy, how much CO2, kilograms or tons of CO2 are you putting in? So those four are important, you know. The implied in there is the cost, this the financial cost. You know, I tend to say that's a human construct, that's important, but if you want to call it, call that a fifth one. But those those numbers we know very well. And what we learn when we look at literature and do the numbers ourselves from first principles is that there's a radical shift in those numbers when you go from fossil to non-fossil, or from nuclear, which is very similar to fossil in those numbers, to non-nuclear. And a shift and that a shift that so very roughly saying speaking, the land premium on renewables, wind and solar, is a hundred to a thousand x. The material premium on wind and solar, compared to fossil fuels, is about a hundred to a thousand x as well, sometimes even ten thousand x for some minerals. And the social premium, this the labor premium, is about ten to a hundred x. And the carbon premium that's the one that well, of course, it's it's It's infinite. It's almost like carbon or no carbon or very close to no carbon. So we're talking about a hundred to a thousand X premiums on these very important things. You know, our our Earth has limited resources. So I don't think we can afford at the and here's where the scales matter. You know, we are a 20 terawatt civilization, aspiring into a 40 terawatt by the time 2050 comes around, and it doubles every 25. So by 2100, if if things continue the way we're doing, and there's no reason to believe they won't, or even accelerate, we will be a 100 plus terawatt civilization. So if we're designing for that, if we're designing for that, can we afford to pay the land premium and the mineral premium and the socioeconomic premium? Simply to trade off the carbon premium? And the answer is no. No, we cannot. We cannot. We cannot. Not at those scales, right? So that's what allows me to tell investors, that's why fusion and deep geothermal are non-negotiable. They're non-negotiable. They need to have it, they will have them because there's no other way.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

You really see it as an inevitable force. Because maybe the question underneath that is how difficult is the engineering problem you're trying to solve? Is it something that people have resigned as impossible?

SPEAKER_01 23:27

I think so so this gets philosophical, right? Um the only let me start with the easy way to answer that question. If we don't get serious about fossil fuels, if we just keep burning them and we just keep extracting them, and there's plenty of those, believe me, uh, then we just keep postponing that decision indefinitely. We just say, you know what, we we can do this stuff, right? Uh and we'll you and I will keep living, and the earth will continue to get more and more climate pressures, but we'll probably carry on through our lives just fine. Um, but we can kick the can down the road if if we just don't really, as a civilization, uh, go hard on this problem. I don't think we're gonna do that because the climate pressures will force our hand. Um so so you have to face this one, and if you have to face this one, more and more people, as time goes on, will become convinced that we're not making progress. We're you know, we've implemented policies to roll out wind and solar and batteries, and they're all over the place, and we're still not shipping at this mountain. That's when these solutions like deep geothermal and fusion become inevitable. We'll see them as the only way to continue to grow into the next realm of civilization. So it is very philosophical. Will we become will we advance through that gate of evolution or will we stay back? I like to think that if we do fusion and geothermal, we'll have a pass to the next one. If not, we'll probably just get hit in the head by by nature, um, and and all kinds of things will happen. You know, geopolitical unrest, you know, uh food insecurity. Nature will reorganize society. Yeah, yeah, and and and there will be humans, you know, life will not go extinct, but it will be a very different world than the one we probably want. So that that that's where my sense of inevitability comes from, is that every time we as a species face these bottlenecks, and it's happened in history all the time. Uh like fitting the world back in the 20s, you would hear things like, How are we gonna feed the world, the growing world? And boom, nitrogen and fertilizers came into industrial scales. You know, that allowed us to explore into the next phase. So I think that's what makes things like this inevitable.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

But underneath that is also a question asking you how difficult is the engineering problem you're trying to solve. Um, because you've mentioned other interviews, I think science experiments in Bavaria and Russia have gone respectively nine and thirteen kilometers deep, and oil rarely gets below three kilometers, I think you said. But you're pushing 20 kilometers, so with you know, factors further. Um how difficult is that? How can you explain to the layman, myself, not a physicist, not a geophysicist, not a geologist, how difficult is it to just drill down into hot rock and yeah, in that is underneath how hard is the engineering problem that your business is trying to solve?

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Oh, it's solvable. It's it is it is a very one of the hardest ones I can think of, but it is it is solvable. Um it is, I mean, we we've put people on the moon, we put autonomous robots on on the surface of another planet. Um we we can do this as a species. We know how to do this, and nature already does this, right? So it's it's not physically impossible. Nature creates these deep glass pipes, conduits which are naturally formed when volcanoes explode, you know, erode uh and explode. Already does it, right? So so these things can be done. We know that. Now, will we do it? I mean, we know now that putting a man on the mood is possible, but we haven't done it in 50 years because we're entertained with other things, right? So so that's that that that that's that's really the question is can are we willing to give it what it takes? It's not just about quase, it's about allowing an industry to be born to really push these things and and open up the way. I think the answer is yes. Now, I I also want to say that even though we always talk about 20 kilometers, 20 kilometers is the most we need to cover the world to blanket the world in geothermal. But it doesn't mean that if you can do three, four, five, you're not already making geothermal much more widely available. So certainly the first borehole, which really is not gonna be a 20 kilometer borehole. We're designing a system to be able to do that, but we'll we'll start blanketing the world in geothermal at 3, 4, 5, 6 kilometers and so on, and that can already be done today with existing technology, just not economically viable. So all we're if you simplify to that extent, we're really just trying to increase the economic viability of doing these things and eventually take it into a frontier that today it's impossible. And I think those two things are important because in order for humans to undertake something major, massive, difficult, you have to see the relevance at a very large scale. So that's how that's how these concepts tie together. Um this is doable, this is solvable, and I think we will have to solve it.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

How do you create the economic viability? Like what is it that you're doing to promise that? Because I presumably that's the you know that's the that's the value that your investors see. Like wow, if Carlos can do this, then we're capturing a hundred times our uh a hundred times our value, potentially, you know, more. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

Um so the I'll answer these in two very different ways, like looking at a coin from two very different faces. The easy one, we make it more efficient to drill. So we're not drilling faster, but we're drilling more consistently throughout the depth. Um, let me give you an example. This I've said in other podcasts as well. The reason drilling that deep is so costly is because you have to replace these drill bits, and the deeper you are, the longer it takes to run the pipe in and out to replace the drill bit. So you may end up drilling 10-20 hours, that's the life of the drill bit, and to replace it, you have to spend days pulling it out of the hole, replacing and putting it back of the hole. Meanwhile, the drilling rig has a full crew and is charging you$100,000 a day. So that's why it gets so expensive. So you can eliminate that in and out, in and out, in and out. You're making great progress with the economics, you start approaching the costs of the most competitive renewables with the advantages of base load, reliable, always there, etc. That's one way to answer that. We're really attacking the efficiency of the drilling process. A more philosophical way to answer this is basically saying, do you think do you think do you think that supply and demand of clean energy is in balance? Clean energy, not energy, clean energy. Do you think that supply and demand of clean energy is in balance for the rest of our lifetimes or not? Do you think there's enough supply to meet the demand of clean energy? And I think the answer is probably gonna be no.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

At this moment, no, the demand outstrips supply significantly. That's why there's so much political uproar about it.

SPEAKER_01 31:10

Yes, and it will continue to do so and even accelerate. So, what happens in basic economics when demand far outstrips supply? Prices go up. So this idea of one cent, two cents, three cents per kilowatt hour electricity, I think it's short-lived. It only lives while fossil fuels are allowed to fill in the gaps. But to the extent we get more and more and more serious about not allowing them to fill the gaps, inevitably clean energy will go up in price. To what extent? Well, to the extent we can accommodate everything else in the economic in the economic system, the global economic system to allow us them. So so you see, we we economics is an artifact of humanity, right? And it shifts back and forth depending on what's important for us. So I I'm I'm not saying this to say that you know we can afford to design expensive stuff, but that the trend, the most likely trend of clean energy and prices, it's actually going to go up because supply is going to be much less. It's going to be a supply-constrained world, not a demand-constrained world.

SPEAKER_00 32:15

You feel like there is a there's a general misunderstanding of the trade-off of uh renewable energy. You know, um the I think the the general understanding is we want the same price of energy, but for it to be carbon-free. And they're missing the huge trade-off that comes there. When you're speaking with investors, you recently just raised an additional$12 million for the business. Congratulations. I think it brings it to an accumulated$52. Um you wrote in response to that there is no energy transition without deep geothermal. Deep geothermal offers always on inexhaustible energy source without fuels, without waste, and without geographical limitations. It also it is also the most powerful, reliable, and abundant primary clean energy source on the earth. So I wanted to ask you, you're speaking to a lot of people who are presumably, you know, experts at sort of niggling out the viability of a product. What are the best questions that they ask you that really test you and make you know question how bullish you are in geothermal and how bullish you are in quase?

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Uh they they are usually related to the speed at which we can actually do these. So so you know, it's not hard for me in these conversations to align on the statements I'm making about you know how much there is or or um how the scale or the availability on a global scale that they there is. I mean, these things are very rarely accepted. So where I tend to get challenged is on, but how do you do it? Is it is it even possible, right? Is it even possible to tap into this energy you talk about and how fast can you do it? Right? So so that's where the argument then becomes along the lines of these being a necessity and not an option. The argument of we have to do this because we're not gonna get there with the other stuff, right? And and that takes you into scale, right? The scale. Um so so when you when when I elevate the dialogue beyond the immediate five to ten years, which is hard to do with investors because a lot of them don't want to think that far out, but they also realize that there's an energy transition going on. This is like facing the industrial revolution at the very beginning. You have to think a little bit bigger. So when I when when they allow me to take them there, to accept that you know we're designing for tens of terawatts, if not hundreds, and that the alternatives don't meet that requirement, I think I think the argument is just about feasibility. The argument is just about time to do it. And and when the argument is just about that, well, that's why we're embracing money to actually establish that this can or cannot be done. So it takes us back to the root of why we're taking money. And and they realize that if we succeed, um you change the world. Fundamentally, right? Because if you buy all of the train, you fundamentally change the world. If you buy the art, the train of arguments that I've been making, and you accept that, okay, there's a chance, there's a possibility this will succeed, you realize how fundamentally different this is. It's like future, very similar.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

Carlos, that that's why I opened up with this question about in a future edition of Energy and Civilization, where do you sit? And where does Quay sit? Because if you do uh take as as the truth and an inevitability what you're saying, it fundamentally changes the world as much, if not more, than the discovery and ubiquitousness of oil simply because it creates the um geopolitical change, it brings down the cost of energy so significantly, you know, and it also solves the biggest for many people sort of existential problem of their generation, which is climate change. That's that's what gets I mean me so excited thinking about geotherm, clearly yourself as well. But how do you think about that? Could you could you could you actually be now? Maybe I'm asking a little bit too personal of a question. When you've had a couple too many beers, and you know, you're sort of just sitting back in your chair and you're thinking, Fucking hell, am I actually on the precipice of becoming a Rockefeller of some t you know entrepreneur type like this?

SPEAKER_01 36:57

So I don't I don't seek those things, but if it's any hint, my wife, my wife of 21 years, she gives me this book, she gives me the biography of Rockefeller and the biography of Vanderbilt and the biography of all of these people who created the 20th century. Now I I don't seek it for that reason, I seek it because I fundamentally believe in what I say, you know, so I I don't shy away from statements as provocative and as bold as the ones I make because I think I can stand my ground with anybody you put in front of me, right? On a technical or an economical basis, economic basis. So so I I I have a lot of confidence, but that confidence is not arrogance, that confidence is mission-driven. That confidence is the way there's only two ways we fail in quase. The first one is this is not feasible, and we realize that in the process, right? That's always a risk. The second one is we I specifically as the CEO fail to help the world understand exactly the meaning of these statements I make. You know, there is no energy transition without geothermal, period. You know, if the world says whatever, it just wants money, as opposed to really, really understand what that means, then I fail. Because we, you know, uh we don't get the resources, we don't get the money, and believe$52 million,$75 million that we've raised today is not enough. Um we we fail, right? So so and that's that's a problem because I'm vested in the in the success of the energy transition of the human species, right? So that's where it comes from. But there's a human side to that, you know. I I don't I don't shy away from personal questions, um, which is you yourself in your thoughts saying, Oh my god, you know, what am I doing? Can can I really believe that what we're trying to do will succeed, you know, and and what if it doesn't? So it creates this dichotomy, this anxiety between what if it does? What if it and what if it doesn't, right? Both things fight and rip you apart. So I've had to develop you know learn skills to cope with my emotions and my thoughts to actually come up to understanding. And my wife is a is a foundation to me, right? She says things like, if not you, who? Right? And and and if you succeed, then the world needs this stuff. There's always in history people that are, or it's it's hardly ever one person, it's always an army. But there's always those group of people that are pivotal in the evolution. If I happen to be one of those, excellent. If not, doesn't matter. But we gotta move this forward because I fundamentally believe it needs to move forward.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Can you point to some of the other people mention specific names and companies who, when you look at the geothermal landscape, you're equally bullish on their technology, their enthusiasm, but maybe also just you know their potential?

SPEAKER_01 40:00

Uh not only in geothermal, you mean in the in the history of humanity?

SPEAKER_00 40:03

No, no, no, in geothermal. Specifically right now in geothermal. Who else you look at as, say, colleagues of a sort who are doing amazing things?

SPEAKER_01 40:13

Oh, all of the startups. I mean, being a startup in geothermal is is tough. It's very tough because it's a very hard thing to do. So when I look at you know what what companies like Fervo, Ever, Greenfire, uh GA Drilling, Sage, Geothermal, Altarock, ourselves, what we're all doing is in some way helping geothermal become a more important actor in that journey. Now, I I very quickly uh differentiate in saying, you know, I I never say why we're better or worse than the other ones, I just say what is the size of the problem that we're trying to solve and how do you actually do it? So when you look at things like closed-loop geothermal systems, they are very good for heat and for providing heat, but they're not good for providing power because they don't have the heat rates or the power density. Yet we still need to electrify a lot of things. So they all have a place to play, but but but the fact that they're trying to grow those markets and advancing the agenda is fantastic. And there's people who are not on startups, people like Jamie Beard, for example. She's such a champion for geothermal, uh, wonderful voice. Uh, that that you you you you have to uh you know be grateful to these people existing because it's it's a mission, it's a vocation, and not what they're pursuing. Um, I think it's still very small. I think the amount of money going into geothermal, the amount of feasibility of geothermal is still too small. And and and that's where I see myself so passionately trying to throw these very, very bold statements and provocations out there because I think it needs to be done. It's like fusion. Fusion does the same, right? It's like, will it ever work in our lifetime? Well, I we have to work on it. You know, sooner or later it's going to work.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

Yeah, nuclear has a as a PR problem though, right? I mean what can be done for geothermal to what what can be done to promote the potential of geothermal to perhaps track to just let people know that geothermal isn't simply a bath in Budapest. You know, that there is there there is more to the heat under the crust of the earth than simply heating some geysers in Iceland. It could also be a source of ubiquitous electricity. So what can be done? Because you know, there's only so much I suppose a business uh owner can do because he has clearly incentives, um, or even a media figure can do, because clearly he also has incentives. It sort of has to come from a government level, right? You know, the amount of attention given to wind and solar is because of the government attention it gets. Shitloads of government money spent on these projects. So it kind of needs to be also shitloads of money going towards J Thermal, because then people will be like, well, why are my tax dollars being spent there? And it's like, well, you know, there's a lot of potential down there, and then maybe starts the conversation so forth.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

Yeah, yeah. I I I mean, in the end, it's awareness. You you cannot support what you don't know about, right? So awareness is a huge part of that. Advocacy, education, awareness, um, elevating the discussion to the right level is is super important. But in the end, you don't need to convince eight billion human beings to support you. You need to convince a very small fraction of that investors, some governments, some utilities, and you just have to show it, right? You have to actually deliver on these promises. And and once you see it, you start realizing oh, this can be very big, this can be very Interesting. This is the beginning of something large. So we focus on that, right? We focus on that, on a little bit of awareness. There's people who do it a lot better, like Jamie Beard, for example. But we gotta then focus on execution and delivery of these things. So it's it's it's doing that balance. I I think the numbers speak for themselves, you know, once you do it. And like win and solar, they were not what they are today, 20 or 30 years ago. They were very, very different. But you s there's enough humans in the world that see where you're going and they'll support it, and then it starts to build itself into policy, into economic policy, social policy. Now the problem is that there's urgency, there's a lot of urgency. So I think something radical will happen in the next 10 to 20 years where the climate pressures will continue to mount, and and when we zoom out and look at the progress with respect to energy transition, we're still gonna see that we're using two-thirds of our electricity, sorry, two-thirds of our energy is fossil. You know, it's not changing no matter how much we pile up the new stuff, it's just not changing. So you really need something that bulldozes that in the other direction. And I think I think this is what this thing's become real time.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

It's funny when you think about the the and again, you know, this hopefully will resonate with you as a it's a cliche, but a first principles thinker. You think about um the problem of climate change is simply just the fact that we started digging up all of this deep carbon from under the earth and released it into our atmosphere and and off tilted the carbon cycle. And when I had uh climate change explained to me that way, uh you know, I immediately thought about it differently because then you can start thinking, why do we still dig up the carbon to create this energy when that is the very problem? And as you say, two-thirds of the world's energy needs today are still being sourced by those sort of means. Um is anyone else in geothermal solely focused on trying to dig deeper like Quays?

SPEAKER_01 46:00

I think there's another company in Europe, um, TA Drilling, that speaks about very deep drilling. Um I think that's the closest um company. We have a common investor, neighbors Industries is a common investor, so so we know each other well, and um we we tend to see each other not as competitive because the market is so gigantic and because the technologies are so different, they're geared towards different depth ranges. So I think that's the only one. There's a few more that are working on drilling technologies. Um Ever themselves are working on the drilling technology, the shot drilling, for example, is an interesting approach. Uh, hyperscience is some of the major oil services companies are are working on ruggedizing their drilling systems, but I think a lot of that's still very much focused on incremental temperature ranges, right? Because it's the two things. You gotta go hotter, but you also gotta go deeper. You know, the reason you go hotter is to increase the power density and improve the economics. The reason you go deeper is that you can cover more of the globe. So some people target the hotter but not deeper. Some people try uh, you know, very few target the deeper and hotter. I think we're the only ones who and G8 really who really target the two things. I think everybody else is just trying to stay shallow, five kilometers, six kilometers, seven at most, but hotter, and that's pretty good. That changes uh geothermal in a significant way. So that's that's how I see it. Um, a lot of people are still trying to work from existing drilling technologies, so they're constrained by the need to be backwards compatible. We we start from a blank drawing board. We understand drilling very well. We we did that as professionals when we work for the oil industry, but but we found ways to open up the design space significantly, basically, by not constraining ourselves to a drill bit or a rotational drill string. Right? That that really opens up a lot of creativity. You can never you can never develop an LED by improving the candle ever, right? So so so at some point you have to drop it and start something different.

SPEAKER_00 48:14

Um is this something you've you've calculated? Um and it's an ab it would be the answer would be an absurd number. But what assuming you could drill say 20 kilometers so there's ubiquitous access all across the globe. Uh what is the total addressable market for quase? Uh just to get an idea of the economic potential for geothermal. Since I sub yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

Yeah, so don't be afraid to say something ridiculous. I I'm not interested to I I'll I'll say something ridiculous and I'll stand my ground. I'll deconstruct it and stand my ground. So so I think the total addressable market is the total primary energy consumption of humanity. Period. Okay. Just like that. And do you know the whole figure behind that? So today that's 23 terawatts, and it's roughly an average 10 cents per k 5 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour. So that is about 10% of global GDP, 10 to 15% of global GDP. You're talking about 10 to 20 trillion dollars a year. That's the market size. Energy is the lifeblood of civilization. That's what we're talking about. Now, why do I say that? Because people would say, well, but surely you don't fly a plane with geothermal. Surely you don't drive a Tesla with geothermal. But you can always you do, yeah. You always connect it back. Where did the electricity come from or where did the heat for the industrial processes that made that thing possible in the first place come from? It all goes back to either heat or electricity, and heat and electricity always go back to primary, which is a handful, and I think geothermal is the one that's going to play. So that's it. That's how I answer that question is the total primary energy consumption of humanity, which today is 23 terawatts, and is growing towards 50 in 2050 and 100 by 2100. So we're talking about a significant percentage of global GDP, you know, an eighth to maybe a seventh of global GDP. It's a big it's a big business.

SPEAKER_00 50:26

Yeah, absolutely. And if you, for example, uh met your ambition and say tomorrow morning you woke up and overnight you'd solve the problem that you can dig 20 kilometers safely, reliably every single time. What happens then? Um how does quase then and your partners presumably, because you would have to have a lot of people that would start actually digging the holes and uh capturing the heat and transit turning into electricity, all the partners to create the the legislation to allow it and so forth. Assume that you you prove the product works every time. What happens then?

SPEAKER_01 51:11

The challenge will be how to most efficiently and quickly deploy worldwide. And there's two things that gives us great leverage. There's the oil industry, which is massive, it's two, three million strong worldwide with supply chains, assets, regulations all over the place. So so they will be the workers that take this technology to scale, and we'll talk about business models in a second, but that will be the workforce and the industry that actually deploys. I don't need to create industry from scratch. And the second one is there's a lot of infrastructure that's ready to go. I can convert a lot of that heat into electricity by virtue of the 10,000 power plants that today run on fossil fuels but tomorrow can run on geothermal steam. So that's that's how we really massively expand. Now, what is Quasis's role in that as a business? Um I think the best model is you start joint venture, right? So in the same way that the oil industry looks at a field development project, and several oil majors come in and and and you know joint venture underwrite permit and then put in the technologies because it's not just one technology, it's many, uh, to make that possible. In that same way, you would actually deploy this technology as kids. So we become a venture partner, a joint venture partner in these power project development projects worldwide. And and and where do we get the money from? Well, we get it from uh the capital markets, you know, private equity markets or the public equity markets, and some of it through that. So we're really talking about major infrastructure deployment at at a very large scale. But that's precisely what the oil industry already does. So it has to be through them. It has to be through them.

SPEAKER_00 53:00

That's how it rolls out. And so then of that total addressable market, eight to ten percent of uh GDP, you know, what are you what what what what do the dollar signs in your investors' eyes say? Like, oh my god, what could quays be worth? What type of what type of uh money are they generating, say for example, assuming uh the scenario that we just laid out?

SPEAKER_01 53:26

Uh it's it's like the major oil companies today, right? So you're talking about in the hundred billion dollars per year, uh not trillions, it's hard to get there, but the valuation of the company is a multiple of that. So it could it could be a trillion dollars.

SPEAKER_00 53:41

Because you're the you're the provider of the electricity, that's why. You're the person who seeks it out.

SPEAKER_01 53:47

You are a partner in the power projects, you know. Okay. So yeah, yeah, because if you're if you're the only one, that means you have to come up with all the capital, and that actually slows you down. But if you are uh a stakeholder, if you own 20% or 30%, or maybe even a 51% controlling, then then you leverage other partners to come with you, and that's how you move faster. But but the revenues of those partnerships, I mean it's like the the oil industry gives you the perfect example. What are the revenues of Exxon? What are the revenues of Shell? What are the revenues of of Chevron? And how are those traced back to their activities worldwide? This would be very similar, and you always land in the high tens and low hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Now thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Now, global energy consumption is increasing, and here we have a resource that, unlike oil and gas, doesn't need to be explored for, it just needs to be tapped into. So I would argue that if you take into account the future possibilities and the risk of that future discounting, it actually becomes even more valuable. The multiple for valuation is much higher. So you I always talk in terms of a trillion dollar company.

SPEAKER_00 54:54

Always, always. Cool, thank you. I and forgive me uh to the audience as well if that was obvious to them. I just uh I really and I still don't fully get it, but I'd love to try and make sense of actually the business case for how Quase works once the technology is proven, you know, how can you then capture the most of this amazing value that you've created by doing the technology? So um if you could measure on a progress bar, 100% being you drill 20 kilometers deep safely, securely every single time, where are you on the on the progress bar as a percentage?

SPEAKER_01 55:35

In the first five percent, easily, right? So we we are at the moment building the first ever machines that can take the drilling process into the field. You know, everything we've done, everything MIT has done before us for 15 plus years, it's always been in the lab. Um now it's time to take it into the field. And taking it into the field doesn't mean we're go we're ready to go and power power plants all over the place. It means let's drill and show that we can reliably do it. Not at 20 kilometers, right? We start at three, four, five. So you see that journey takes you through making the machines for the field, getting increasingly deeper, repowing power plants uh that are in high geothermal gradient zones, and then repowering power plants that are in high geo in low geothermal gradient zones. So so we're we're we're 5% of the way there. Another way I put it, if people ask me, how much money do you need for this thing to achieve escape velocity? Right? For it not to have to go to investors and get equity money every single time. And I always put that number anywhere between 500 million and 1 billion dollars. Uh, we are at 75, we're 7.5% of the way there. So by all measures, we are there, right? That's where we are, very early. Uh, and and therefore that's why I'm so um so so so so strong at bringing awareness because these things die very quickly when they're that young. They're they're embryonic and and and they they wither and they don't get the attention they need. So you need to get them into it. They need the hundred million dollar nutrients. Interestingly, this is not atypical. I worked in Snowbridge. Big projects usually cost anywhere from a hundred to five hundred million dollars and take between five to ten years, right? So we're not doing anything different. A higher security in that. There is a higher security because you have a portfolio and because you have a revenue generating machine that's fit in that. So but but probably not as high an ambition, right? Probably higher security, but probably not a high as ambition. As ambitions, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 57:41

I mean, I challenge anyone to match your ambition. I think it's I think it's so unbelievable. And again, I'll say it again, I said it to your fair, but I find it tremendously exciting, and I um you know really you know, can only imagine how excited you would be as well. And also at the moment with Quase, you're sort of exclusively uh you've exclusively employed sort of physicists and geophysicists and scientists, right? There isn't necessarily businessmen on the team who are trying to start to I don't know, do whatever businessmen do.

SPEAKER_01 58:14

We we do have a little bit of that, right? So we it's mostly it's mostly technical stuff, it's mostly engineering and scientists, uh, because a lot of the work is that. But but it's never too early to try to understand how you penetrate various markets. Which which who do you power first? Do you power a large industrial center or do you power a power plant, right? That takes a lot of discovery and quantitative analysis. So we have an emergent business team. Uh, we announced the head for that team uh recently, Kevin, he's the CFO and head of corporate development, is leading that team to really precisely understand what is the true value of this technology. If you can truly create, you know, unleash energy at that scale no matter where you are. What do you do with it? Do you just sell it to the utility or do you partner with the best hydrogen company and sell the added value of the two products? Right? These things require a lot of creative thinking on the business model side, and and and and we have, you know, maybe percentage-wise, 80, maybe 90% of the company is technical, 10% of the company is non-technical.

SPEAKER_00 59:29

It's funny, there might be a um a convex relationship between as the progress bar of the quase technology goes further, that number will switch, and it'll be 80-90% businessmen and you know five to ten percent scientists when you get towards the 70-80% sort of um accuracy guarantee that you'll be able to drill drill that deep. And at that point you'll have all the technologies cooking and you you're going to do it.

SPEAKER_01 59:55

So you always have a technical team.

SPEAKER_00 59:57

Yeah. Just to round off quays specifically, where you are, and I know we haven't spoken directly about what the um technology is that makes you guys different and also so innovative. Um I think just because I haven't the capacity necessarily to understand it beyond that it's microwave technology. I don't know, maybe it's up to you whether you want to describe what it is or not. Because for me, what's more uh exciting about it is the potential once it's done. You know, we don't know how a phone works, but we understand the implications of a phone, for example.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:33

Yeah. So I I use an analogy that people find helpful to try to explain what's the big idea behind the technology. Um you and I are talking right now in real time, and we're many time zones away. Uh the reason that's possible is because fiber optics uh were invented. The ability to shine a light beam through a piece of glass and transfer that light unaltered for many, many, many kilometers opened up light speed communications worldwide. So if if I stretch that analogy a little bit and the physics are somewhat related, we the big idea behind Quasis Drilling System is that we are using a very high power fiber optic. That's you know, I I I want to give it a new name, it's called a wave guide, but you can think of it as a metallic fiber optic, which is maybe that size, the size of my my my fist fits in it, so it's big, it's not tiny. And we have the ability to push a megawatt, a megawatt is like a jet engine type power when it takes off, you know, a 747. We can push that type of energy through that pipe over very, very, very long distances. That's the big idea. So instead of having to twist a little spaghetti to grind rock at the end of it, uh, we just beam this massive amount of power, which travels at the speed of light and just gets down there and evaporates the rock. And all we have to do at that point is blow the ashes out, they just come up with a little bit of air. So that's in a nutshell, really the idea. And we're about to release a video. Maybe by the time you put this out, I don't know when you're putting this out, we'll have it there because a lot of people ask that, you know, how does it actually work? And it's this concept that we're beaming a lot of energy over a waveguide, and that process looks a lot like lasers on a fiber optic on steroids. That's an oversimplification. There's a lot more in physics. There's about microwaves, there's about uh waveguide attenuation, there's about stocks, uh, terminal velocity numbers, inflow control, well board integrity, but but but those are very specialized. That's the big idea. And and it's a big idea because it keeps the drilling system very simple. If you want something that survives extreme conditions, you you make it as simple as possible because you have less things to break. It also means you sacrifice functionality. So we're not talking about diversional drilling, we don't talk about fancy measurement while drilling schemes. Uh it's very primitive by those standards, but it's sheer value, it's in the ability to just burn a whole through rock, uh, you know, to depths that are impossible otherwise.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:26

Will it vaporize the same regardless of the temperature of the rock?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:31

It will vaporize, always vaporize because energy will always overcome matter. You know, the energy is so intense that it will always take the matter, whether it's granite or basalt or water or limestone or sandstone, and it will heat it up and evaporate. You know, you overwhelm the solid so much with energy that it actually very quickly liquefies and almost instantly vaporizes. And once it's vaporized, well, you've won the battle. Now you blow it out. You cannot blow out a solid chunk of rock and coal, but you can blow out tiny little ash particles.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:11

Wow. That is a that is a very understandable analogy. Though it does sound a little bit too simple, you know what I mean? Like sure, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:22

Why didn't I think of that? Why didn't I think of that? It was MIT that thought of that. Because I didn't know about wave guys, I didn't know about gyrotrons, I didn't know about the physics of that process of evaporation, right? So they're the ones who put it all together because they have to deal with those problems and challenges in the physics of plasma fusion reactors. So for them, it was a small stretch of the imagination to actually go where they went, and and here we are.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:51

Nice. On your website, you specifically say that part of the promise of geothermal is the way that it would fundamentally change the geopolitical landscape. And I know that we've alluded to it a few times already, but I just wanted to ask you directly at it to try and say explain at least to the audience what what that would mean. Because you worked in oil for so many years. We all understand that, say, for example, um energy dependence was a huge motivating factor in the current war. Uh you can look to all across the world for how you know energy and economic development really do sit hand in hand. So that's the gl that's the macro in your experience directly, whether you have additional learnings about it, and then as well, if you could just lay out the the the case for why it changes geopolitics.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:40

Yeah. Um so yes, I I think it has the potential to change geopolitics, but geopolitics will all will always exist because there's vested interest in geopolitics existing, right? For example, before I answer, you know, I'm from Colombia. Colombia has a lot of oil. We don't have a single refinery. Right? Uh why is that? Well, because the the the larger world of capitalism has a vested interest in actually taking the raw material, refining it, and selling back a mar an added value. So so I think I think oil creates geopolitics for that reason, because the resource is not universal, and because you have to do something to that resource to make it valuable. And the resource actually transports quite well. Wind and solar are different because you don't need the fuel. It comes to you no matter where you are. You know, you don't have to get a license to get a little bit of sunshine or the wind. So in that sense, it changes the geopolitics, but you still are dependent on the geopolitics of the things you need to build those acids. You still need to build the raw ingredients, right? So you're always dependent on just geopolitics. Geothermal is closer to wind and solar in that it doesn't have geopolitics related to the inputs and outputs, the fuel, you know, the heat comes to you regardless. But it still has geopolitics with respect to building the stuff. You know, if you're gonna go and drill these holes, well, you're gonna have to call the people who know how to do it, and that creates some geopolitics. But the minute it's built, that asset then really divorces you from the geopolitics of procuring your energy. You could say the same thing of wind and solar, the fundamental difference being that one is a lot more concentrated energy than the other one. So you could have a ton of solar parks, and once you have them behind the fence in your country, you're the you could say the geopolitics are done, you're done with geopolitics because you can get all the energy, or you can have a geothermal park. But the difference in energy, the output between those two, and the land materials, everything intensity that it takes is going to be fundamentally different. So, yes, there will always be geopolitics, but I think it fundamentally changes that because once you build those assets, um it really gives you uh a level of energy independence that today is it's actually not possible with anything else. I I don't think even with nuclear, I don't think even fission or fusion could get you to that level of independence because you still need fuels for those and you still need to deal with the waste. So so that's that's where that comment is coming from. But yes, you know, you you won't find a millimeter wave drilling system in your local supermarket, so you're gonna have to call somebody from outside the country to do it for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:27

Right. Right. Um, and what about grid infrastructure? Uh, I wonder also from your experience, how much you know about this, is that also closely tied to the economic development of a country, or at this stage, is it quite ubiquitous that there will be a grid close enough to an geothermal installation to to make that transition rather seamless? They're already each generation into electricity.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

Yeah, they're already. So if you think about us wanting to repower power plants as a first step, of which there are 10,000, you know, they are already connected to the grid. Right? So so we don't need to worry about that. We just drill around the power plant, provide steam to the power plant, exactly at the steam specification the power plant needs, and everything else runs the same way. Now, when you need when you build new infrastructure, you need to create, you need to make sure it's interconnected. But the beauty of geothermal is you can put it no, you can put it anywhere, right? So, you know, if you have the option of putting it right next to the city that you're trying to power versus you know across the continent and then you know driving thousand-mile transmission lines because the resources out there, that really changes things. So we and Soda have that issue, they're so diffuse, and they there's some places that are clearly much better than others for those resources. You have to create a low transmission. I don't think it's the case with geothermal for those two reasons. One, you repower power plants which are already connected, and number two, you can you can actually you have the luxury to put it as close as possible as you want, as you need.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:01

Beautiful, and this as well is something that um we've also addressed addressed peripherally, and I think you've definitely made the bullish case for geothermal, um, and as you have many times before, but I just wanted to bring up a rather sort of bearish, you know, pessimistic view of geothermal. And that is uh coming from the Pulitzer Prize-winning energy journalist and historian, a fellow called Daniel Jurgen. So he wrote a book last year called The New Map, and in one of the final chapters, it's titled The Changing Landscape: Disruptive Tech, Energy of Transition, etc. And I was keenly waiting to hear what he had to say about geothermal. And he didn't even mention it once. And so I so it kind of got me thinking, you know what? I'm not gonna accuse this guy of having any sort of political bias. I'm gonna take him at his word that he's a rather objective, rational actor, you know, similar to Vaclav Smil. And if as you've sort of laid out, the biggest upside ever since the discovery of you know the Saudi oil fields can be realized just 10 to 20 kilometers below our feet, and we have this legacy labor in oil and gas, who are all the best geophysicists in the world, the best uh drilling engineers in the world, and they haven't realized the potential of it. Could it be the case that it's just too good to be true? And forgive me, I like I said, it's a pessimistic take, but I wanted to ask it directly just to see what you thought.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:43

I I I I think that's always going to be true of everything massively disruptive, right? So uh I I've read the book, and uh surely, not surprisingly, geothermal takes a paragraph somewhere. Um, I think most people discount geothermal because they don't think it's possible. What we're trying, what we're saying we're going to do, most people don't think it's possible. And and we don't know that it's possible, right? You know, we're honest with that. We think it's possible, and if you ask with experts in physics, experts in fusion, experts in drilling, once they understand it, they think it could be possible. Otherwise, we wouldn't be getting any money. So so the way I answer that is um that argument will always apply. If you had the equivalent of his book a hundred years ago, would you have painted in the picture many of the things that came 20 years later? Probably not. You miss them all, every single one. You miss them every single time, right? By definition, because they're disruptive, they come out of the far field, nobody sees them. So I think that's the best way I can answer, you know. When you were flying little planes back in the first world war, did you ever imagine that the second world war, but you never imagine a second world war, but that you were gonna have jet planes. No, ever, never, never. So so we cannot foresee what it's disruptive in the future by definition. And by definition, but but the world always changes because of those things, especially because of those things. So I'm a technologist, I always know that somewhere these things are lurking, and someday they drop into the world, and the world changes.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:20

I love it. There's a uh there's an aphorism in The Black Swan by Nasinteleb, and it's how can we predict a future of infinite possibilities based off our finite experience of the past? And it's it is a way to change your worldview, to look at, say, the skeptical take on geothermal and say, Look, mate, you have just as good an idea for where we'll be in five years as the rest of us. If this is if this geothermal thing is so compelling that it's got brilliant people like you know, John Redfern, Magnus Brandberg, Khalasarake there, then you know I'm willing to hitch my ride to that wagon, and who knows where you'll all be explaining in hindsight like Jurgen's next book, A New Map, 2025. It'll be like this geothermal, you know. Clearly, it just you just needed the con the convalescence of all the technologies to come together, and it was an inevitability, you know. And then in hindsight, this narrative will be written. But um, anyway, that's that's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:23

And actually in hindsight, you'll say, Oh, of course, it was obvious, it was there, right below. Of course, of course, it's always there. I mean, yeah, this is the history of humanity over and over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:37

Finally, um, well, not finally, but the last of the geothermal questions. We opened up with Vaklav Smil. I thought your um answer to uh cost per unit of the different types of energy was magnificent, and I think that was clearly uh you you leant on Vaklav Smil there. Is there something that you routinely will bring up uh that is because of something you learnt from Vaklav Smil?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:06

I think there's two elements to a lot of the literature I've read from him. Uh the first one is the concept of power density, which which ties very closely to the land intensity of the energy, the various energy uses. That's one, right? I I think that's what got me first into this journey of understanding. Okay, this stuff needs to be done purely purely from a power density perspective. The second one is the speed at which energy transitions happen. That that's a very important concept because that gives us the long-term view. You know, shifting the world from doing things one way to doing things another way takes decades, if not centuries, right? So so to the extent we can leverage the infrastructure that's already there, a century plus of infrastructure from fossil fuels, we'll accelerate that by a century. Right? So those two things are very keenly influential in my rhetoric, and they come from him, right? Um now I learned about Backlas through Bill Gates, you know, Bill Gates notes. He always talks about him and says, Who's who's him? And I started reading every single book, and this was this was as I was doing my own diligence for Quays, you know, because it took me a year to understand that this wasn't a waste of time. Um, and and and and all of that was part of that decision-making process.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:35

Amazing. Carlos, I just have uh two more for you, and these are questions that I ask every guest that comes on the show. The first is what is a country looking into the future that you're particularly bullish on? From what point of view? Economica, whichever whichever floats your boat the most. You could say geothermal, but perhaps there is a you know an interest in your personal life that overweighs it more. Perhaps there's a sense of deep nationalism that comes out, and you want to mention Colombia, but I don't I don't know. You tell me.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:06

I I think if I tie it to a geography, right, I I like to think the developing world holds great promise, right? Because I think the real challenges are going to be embodied there, not in the developed the developed world, but the developing emerging economies. The challenge is the human component, the complexity, the socioeconomic complexity, but some countries starting to start to emerge from that. You know, I I I let me give you a very unexpected answer. India is something that embodies a lot of the the challenges, transitions that we're gonna see coming forward, you know. There's a lot of population, they see the climate pressures, uh, they have real trade-offs in the space, the land use they have. Uh I think if if if if we can solve energy, food, water security for India, we can solve it for the world at large. So so I I like to think of India as a very interesting use case for for many of the things the world is trying to do today. Um yeah, that's how I would answer that. I think I think you know, every other country, I mean, yeah, I have reasons, I I've lived in the tropics, I've lived in the far north. There's good things about all of them. Uh climate change throws the table upside down, right? Everything we think we know about the stability of a place, it's uprooted, right? Some people say that the tropics will become unlivable and and the north will become really nice, and I don't buy that argument. I think I think averages will go up, but the extremes in the high latitudes will actually whack you. Uh so so so I I you know I don't think anybody can possibly say what the world looks like in a changing climate. Nobody. Uh no matter how you model it. So I like to think more in terms of how we as humans come together and solve these challenges, and I think India then represents represents one of the best uh examples of trying to do this as a species.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:21

Um what are the signals that you see to support that thesis? Is India doing anything particularly exceptional, or is this just sort of more of a uh a hope that you have?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:32

I think it's because they're gonna they're gonna feel some of these things much more readily than any anybody else. I mean, maybe I cannot generalize the world, but if you think about trying to circumstances will force, will push, will accelerate some of those decisions much more readily in a country like India than in some other places that are maybe a lot more comfortable and they're not feeling the pressure. So I think that's what gives me it's it's necessity is the matter of invention, necessity is the matter of moving forward. So I think if anything, what I'm saying here is that a country like India will embody that need to change, like nothing that I can possibly think of.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:18

Amazing. Finally, Carlos, if you could witness a conversation between any two people of history, dead or alive, no language barrier, a podcast, who would you listen to?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:30

Oh man. Ah, people in different times will have very different mind frameworks. I don't know that they can even communicate. So I'll I'll choose, I'll choose so much closer. You know, I I have a fascination with physics and um the the progress of thermodynamics as a science um and its connection with with with you know deep physics, concepts in quantum, quantum, concepts in general relativity, etc. So I I love to see a conversation between uh somebody like maybe maybe if I can make it more than two, somebody like Einstein at Einstein at his peak with Stephen Hawking at his peak, with maybe Maxwell at his peak, you know, and Boers, right? That you know, that the congregation of minds, some of those actually overlapped in their lives. Uh Hawkins is perhaps a little bit later, but seeing these people trying to talk about the unification of a physics theory would be fascinating. I think that that would be to me the one.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:45

I love it. I love it. Um what about is Elon Musk someone then that you really sort of admire and respect? Because he also speaks in these very if physics doesn't uh if if it's not possible through physics, it's not possible at all. I only think about things from a first principle like that. You know, how how do you think about this guy? Is he an admirational figure to you?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:07

Since he's also a very successful entrepreneur. Uh he is absolutely very, very influential in my thinking. Uh he's very controversial in many things, but I kind of don't worry about that part. I just I just look at the way he thinks and the way he he moves humanity forward. You know, he's thinking about things that to most people are just like, why are you doing that stuff? And then he he finds a brilliant way to tie those things to something that's very useful to actually make to use the forces of capitalism to move it forward, right? He's not just out there in a cloud dreaming about how to put someone into Mars, but he actually ties it to the present and says, Hey, we can make uh putting things in space a lot more economical. And by the way, that's probably going to be uh a foundational piece to be building a business that eventually takes us to us. So so I I I love that kind of thinking it to me is fascinating, and I identify very closely with that way of thinking.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:00

He said something uh really, really fascinating that I'm sure either you're familiar with or you would resonate with deeply, but it was on the problem of manufacturing at scale. Um, and he basically said that you know, with enough iterations, everything sort of just trends towards the cost of a product only equaling the cost of its components because labour has become so efficient that it's no longer a variable cost. And when you were speaking about quays earlier and you know it on a timeline, presumably, you know, your your hundredth drill will cost a fraction of your first drill, and it's just this um that's when the real scale can take off and all the amazing elements.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:43

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean it's it's it's optimization through iteration, absolutely. It happens to in everything, in everything, yeah. And it will happen in this, it will happen in energy, it will happen in millimeter wave feeling. For sure. We we're counting on it, we are we're actually precipitating it already at this early stage.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:02

Well, Carlos, I can't thank you enough for being so generous with your time. So uh thank you very much, mate, and uh couldn't be more excited to see what what Quase does in the next couple of years. Ryan, thank you. Great having the time with you as well and putting this out into the world. Thank you again, Carlos, and dear listener, I do apologize for the audio. I want you guys to know that I do everything within my limited means to make the audio as studio perfect as possible. And one day, when this podcast pays for itself, I will send out professional mics to every guest and even hire them studios so quiet is guaranteed. But for now, this bootstrap job means that even with the best prep, at times the guests cannot simply guarantee a quiet space. So I understand how jarring the background noise can be. But since you have listened this far, I want to just thank you for bearing with me. This was an amazing chat. I hope you agree with me. Uh Carlos speaking about the per unit energy differential cost for the different types of uh for the different sources of energy was magnificent. It was outstanding. This guy, Vaklav Smil, is clearly a huge influence on Carlos Sadake, and it was because of Carlos that I started listening to some of Vaklav Smil's books, and truly they are remarkable. They're not entertaining. The only reason you would listen to or read one is out of um pure curiosity to learn cold hard facts. You will not be entertained by it, but you will be surprised repeatedly. Vaklev does a remarkable job at looking at the differences in energy densities and then how that then is the uh the building blocks, the driver of changes in civilization. And so, should geothermal at depth that uh Carlos and Quase are trying to achieve be realized, then holy cow, we have a truly transformational uh innovation breakthrough on our hands. Um so again, thank you to all involved, Carlos, you, my dear listener, and uh the copious amounts of traffic outside of Carlos's window. They were all a part of this podcast. Thank you, everyone. Uh before you go though, I want to uh explain my ambition for this podcast. And this might be the first time you've ever listened to this show, so if that is the case, then I want to thank you and welcome you to the podcast. And uh what my hope is to do with this show is to corner the podcast market for eclectic curiosities in whatever country it is that you're listening in from. So, what does it mean to corner a podcast market for eclectic curiosities? That genre doesn't exist per se. You cannot filter via eclectic curiosities. So it's listed under education or investing or some crap like that. But it is eclectic curiosities, and the podcast distribution systems are in the Stone Age. They are functioning off one variable, which is reviews and uh subscriptions. So do me a favor, swipe up your podcasting app, whether it's Apple, Podcast, Overcast, whatever. Leave five stars, leave a very juicy, healthy, nicely worded, uplifting review, and please tell friends about this show, tell your family, take your brother, your sister, your child's phone, and say subscribe to the Curious Worldview, leave five stars, and trust me, it's good. Download the library, do whatever you can to pump energy for this podcast into those various podcast distribution algorithms because truly they suck. Given all the data that we have, somehow they haven't implemented it into their algorithms. Nonetheless, that's my ambition for the podcast. That was Carlislaid okay. Thank you so much for listening. Again, I have I keep teasing it, but a lot of great uh high profile guests in the pipeline. But I keep getting these exciting, more time pressing individu uh podcasts to do before they come out. But nonetheless, bear with me. I thank you for listening. Ciao.