Quaise Energy hosts live public demos of tech that could unlock clean, renewable geothermal energy for the world

Company continues aggressive push to prove first drilling innovation in 100 years

Science Communications

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Henry Phan, Vice President of Engineering at Quaise Energy, talks to the audience at the September 4 public demonstration of the company’s novel drilling technology.

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Credit: Quaise Energy

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HOUSTON, Texas—Quaise Energy recently hosted the first of several public demonstrations in Texas literally showing a live audience for the first time how the company can drill into a granite outcrop in a quarry with pure energy rather than the conventional drill bits associated with drilling for oil and gas.

 

CEO Carlos Araque calls the technology involved “the first drilling innovation in 100 years.” He believes that it could allow the world to access superhot, superdeep clean, renewable geothermal energy—the heat beneath our feet—on a scale equal to fossil fuels.

 

Susan Petty, who has over 34 years of experience in the geothermal industry, is President and Founder of AltaRock Energy. Commenting on LinkedIn about Quaise’s progress to date, she wrote, “What Quaise has done, solving every problem that came their way, is truly amazing. Congrats to Carlos and the team. Such an accomplishment.”

 

Live Drilling, Tours

 

At the September 4 event, some 56 observers braved 99-degree heat to not only watch the drilling process in action—complete with real-time data projected on a flat-screen TV—but also tour four stations related to the work. 

 

Steve Jeske, a Quaise project manager, emceed the live drilling operation, which also included live footage of the growing hole itself. He acknowledged that there really wasn’t much to see. Why? “Because drilling, when it’s done well, is very boring. And that’s a very, very good thing. It means it’s very safe.”

 

Stops on the tour that followed the demo included the drilling rig, which resembled a small derrick; the trailer holding the gyrotron, which produces the energy—millimeter waves—used for drilling; and the driller’s cabin, also known as the doghouse, where a small crew controls the entire process.

 

At the final station, attendees peered down the record-setting hole the company completed in July. A live video camera threaded down the hole facilitated the observations, which showed a uniform hole transition from surface soil to granite. At some 118 meters, that hole is the deepest ever drilled with millimeter-waves, which are similar to the microwaves we cook with. Millimeter waves are powerful enough to ablate the pink granite at the Marble Falls, TX, demonstration site into a grey ash, samples of which were available on the tour.

 

In a video released the day of the September 4 demonstration, Matt Houde, co-founder of the company with Araque and Chief of Staff, said, “At Quaise, we’re rapidly moving from microwaves in the ground to megawatts on the grid.”  

 

Said Araque at the demo, “Quaise is not a drilling company, it’s an energy company. We aim to make geothermal the workhorse of the energy transition, and we won’t stop until we succeed.”

 

Progressively Challenging Demonstrations

 

The Marble Falls demonstration in July was the latest of several progressively challenging demonstrations over the past year showing the company’s progress.

 

According to Justin Lamb, head of field operations at Marble Falls, “Last fall we started by drilling four feet into a granite core inside our Houston lab. Then we moved right outside the lab to drill ten feet into another granite core.” In May of this year the company drilled 40 feet into a granite core on a full-scale oil rig just outside of Houston owned by Nabors, one of the world’s largest oil-and-gas drilling companies.

 

For Lamb, the July demonstration “was a critical moment. Could we make this work out in the field?” All of the previous demos had been conducted under controlled experimental conditions.

 

The answer was yes. “We were able to drill that 118 meter hole on our first try,” Lamb said. “It’s been highly successful, beyond all of our best hopes.”

 

The Marble Falls demonstration also had other positive results. For example, even though the team wasn’t overly concerned with the drilling rate—“we started slow to make sure it worked,” Lamb said—they still showed that they can drill at a rate of up to five meters per hour through some of the hardest rock in the world. “That’s extremely fast,” Lamb said.

 

Henry Phan, Vice President of Engineering at Quaise, explained that today’s commercial operations average a drilling rate of a tenth of a meter per hour through granite. Quaise’s long-term goal is to drill at a continuous rate of penetration, regardless of rock hardness and depth.

 

Phan went on to note that the hole diameter at Marble Falls was four inches. “Our production goal is eight and a half inches.”

 

Marble Falls was also important because “it allowed us to test and validate what our engineers have been modeling for a few years, and the data are matching up really well, which is quite exciting,” said Emilie Williams, Test Group Manager at Quaise and one of four tour guides at the demonstration along with Houde, Phan, and Jeske.

 

What’s Next?

 

What’s next in the company’s aggressive timeline to prove its technology? According to Araque, it aims to break its own drilling record by drilling ten times as deep, to one kilometer. This could take place within the next few months.

 

In the meantime, the Quaise team is working to optimize the entire process through additional tests. “We’ll experiment with various parameters to, for example, control how straight the hole is and see if we can go even faster,” Williams said.

 

The company is hosting six more public demonstrations at the Marble Falls quarry over the next three months. If you would like to attend, send an email to <info@quaise.com>.

 

When Araque was first introduced to the MIT technology behind what would become Quaise, he remembers trying hard to “put my finger on what could kill a company based on [that technology]. I couldn’t find anything, and neither could my colleagues. The only way to find out was to do it. And today I’m even more convinced that this is possible.”

 Marble Falls Update with Matt Houde - 1080p [VIDEO] | 

In this video Matt Houde, Co-founder and Chief of Staff for Quaise Energy, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the demonstration site and granite quarry where the Quaise team is conducting the first-ever field tests of millimeter wave drilling.

By Elizabeth A. Thomson, Correspondent for Quaise Energy

 

UMass Amherst researcher receives $1.12 million NSF grant to study impacts of water governance on children’s health in five countries

Part of an international research forum focused on global environmental change, the project seeks to strengthen community involvement in water management

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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A University of Massachusetts Amherst public health researcher has been awarded a three-year, $1.12 million grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a multinational examination of therelationship between water governance systems and the health of young children, amid a backdrop of global climate change. 

The ultimate goal of the YAKU project—yaku means water in Kichwa, the most widely spoken indigenous language in Ecuador—is to improve the health and well-being of children and reduce under-age-5 mortality by strengthening community participation in the water governance structures. 

This project marks the latest in continuing international research on community participation in the governance of resources led by Daniel López-Cevallos, associate professor of community health education in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences. 

With core collaborators including Fundación Octaedro in Ecuador and the Water Resources Planning and Management Research Center (GESPLA) in Brazil, López-Cevallos’ project is focusing on three countries in the Andean region (Ecuador, Peru and Chile) and two in the North African Maghreb (Morocco and Tunisia). The team will work with community and university partners. 

The researchers will examine the demands on water resources in these regions and consider the impacts of climate change. “One key aspect of this project is mapping that out in the Andean region and comparing that to the Maghreb region,” López-Cevallos says.   

Bernardo Cañizares, executive director of Fundación Octaedro, explains that in a context of global environmental change, a central objective is “to understand the mechanics by which local water governance affects the well-being of communities and how these communities are being involved—or not being involved—in decision-making in managing waterresources.” 

The project is funded under the NSF partnership with the Belmont Forum, a group of funding agencies, international scientific councils and regional consortia that support “transnational research to help understand, mitigate and adapt to global environmental change.” 

López-Cevallos and team will gather socioeconomic data and information on water governance, water-related health risks and infant mortality. Then they will propose a modeling framework to simulate the response to different interventions aimed at improving the water governance structure. 

“It’s larger than just the mortality issue,” López-Cevallos says. “Mortality is a good indicator, not just of child health, but also of the overall performance of health systems in a country or region and of well-being amongst the most vulnerable. And then we’ll connect the issue of community participation with the health outcomes in the five countries we’re studying.” 

The team will build on the work being done at GESPLA, part of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sol. Professor Guilherme Marques, who will use systems dynamic modeling to create the simulations, says it isn’t clear which elements of water governance structure most directly impact infant mortality in low- and middle-income countries, especially among rural communities. 

 “A better understanding of this will allow us to improve our water resources and environmental and sanitation policies, starting with the actions with the greatest impact,” Marques says.  

López-Cevallos says the researchers hope their findings will help provide evidence of the type of water management systems—be they public, private or a mix —that facilitate the most community involvement and best health outcomes. 

“If our hypothesis is correct that more community participation leads to better health outcomes, we will look at how it is being manifested in the different regions, because that can serve for cross pollination within and across the regions for ways in which communities can be enabled to participate in decision-making around water governance.” 

About the University of Massachusetts Amherst   

The flagship of the commonwealth, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a nationally ranked public land-grant research university that seeks to expand educational access, fuel innovation and creativity, and share and use its knowledge for the common good. Founded in 1863, UMass Amherst sits on nearly 1,450-acres in scenic Western Massachusetts and boasts state-of-the-art facilities for teaching, research, scholarship, and creative activity. The institution advances a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community where everyone feels connected and valued—and thrives, and offers a full range of undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees across 10 schools and colleges, and 100 undergraduate majors.   

 

 

eDNA can help detect kelp-derived carbon on ocean floor

Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

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Saccharina latissima, or sugar kelp, growing at a Maine commercial kelp farm

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Credit: Brittney Honisch, Bigelow Laboratory

New environmental DNA tools can accurately and inexpensively quantify kelp-derived biomass in sediments below commercial kelp farms, according to research recently published in PLOS One.

The new study, led by researchers at Bigelow Laboratory, demonstrates the value of ecosystem-wide and kelp-specific eDNA tools and confirms that kelp aquaculture has little impact on the bottom communities living below the farm. The findings also showcase how eDNA tools could inform “blue carbon” accounting effort by helping quantify the deposition rates of kelp-derived carbon into marine sediments.

“If you look on the seafloor below a kelp farm, there’s a lot of organic matter, but we haven’t had very specific ways of detecting what is in these sediments and where it comes from,” said Senior Research Scientist David Emerson, the senior author on the paper. “The eventual goal is to find evidence for kelp biomass being buried into sediments for long-term removal of CO2, and we’ve shown that eDNA may be an effective way to examine that.”

Maine is the largest kelp-producing state in the country with a rapidly growing industry focused largely on Saccharina latissima, or sugar kelp. Researchers have been working to understand whether carbon-rich biomass shed from commercial farms — both naturally throughout the growing season and from excess material lost during harvesting — accumulates in underlying sediments. If so, passive transfer of kelp to the seabed could potentially be a tool for carbon dioxide sequestration and generate added revenue for a farmer. Assessing how valuable kelp is as a blue carbon strategy, though, requires quantitative methods for precisely measuring that accumulation of kelp-derived carbon in sediments over time.

Bulk stable isotope methods can be used to estimate the overall amount of organic carbon and nitrogen in sediments. However, scientists can’t precisely say how much of that carbon comes from any one algal species, and the method remains expensive and time consuming.

That’s where new molecular tools come in. In the study, the team tested two tools, sampling for eDNA in the sediments underlying a long-running commercial kelp farm in the Gulf of Maine over two farming seasons.

Metabarcoding involves extracting all the available DNA in the sediment to fingerprint all of the marine organisms in a sample. It provides a relative measure of how abundant different organisms are and a sense of the overall biological diversity.

The team applied this approach to examine what’s living in sediments both directly underneath and nearby the farm. It revealed subtle but minor differences inside versus outside, providing some of the first quantitative evidence in New England that the farms have little effect on the makeup of the seafloor community.

The metabarcoding approaches, though, were not sensitive enough to detect much kelp eDNA. To that end, the team also developed a digital polymerase chain reaction (dPCR) probe designed specifically to detect sugar kelp. Similar to a COVID test, this PCR approach allows researchers to precisely measure the number of gene copies, down to single digits, of kelp DNA in each sample.

“With DNA, unlike the stable isotope methods we used for comparison, there’s little question that what you’re measuring is biomass directly from kelp — in fact the specific species of kelp being grown on that farm,” Emerson said. “The metabarcoding approach is valuable for teasing apart subtle differences in the community as a whole, but this species-specific tool is proving to be extremely sensitive and pretty cost effective for detecting kelp alone.”

With the quantitative PCR method, the team confirmed that the amount of kelp biomass in sediment was more variable, and on the whole slightly higher, in sampling sites directly below the farm compared to those nearby.

The study’s lead author, Samuel Tan, points out that kelp DNA appears to break down faster than other parts of the plant. That means it’s not a perfect 1:1 relationship between the number of gene copies they measure and total kelp biomass, and the method is likely a conservative estimate of the amount of kelp being deposited in sediment.

“The study shows that eDNA can be a powerful tool for providing information about even fairly subtle changes, providing sensitivity and specificity that few methods can match,” said Tan, a University of Maine doctoral candidate advised by Emerson and Jeremy Rich, a professor at the Darling Marine Center and co-author on the paper. “There are still unknowns of course, so we’re working to expand and intensify our sampling efforts and better understand the relationship between the amount of DNA we measure and kelp biomass.”

To that end, the researchers have been sampling systematically at more sites below this farm and others, which has confirmed these initial results and allowed them to start teasing apart the variability in deposition beneath each farm.

Emerson stressed that this initial work showed that there is relatively little kelp naturally deposited beneath these kelp farms on the whole. But the next round of sampling is ongoing, and related research suggests that the amount of organic carbon in sediments tends to be higher in larger, older kelp farms found in other parts of the world.

“Back to our overarching question of carbon sequestration, we’re starting to think about how we could actually help farmers to improve — and capitalize on — the process to ensure more kelp is deposited, strategically and for longer,” Emerson said. “That’s a question that was previously near impossible to answer, but is increasingly straightforward with these novel eDNA methods we’re developing.”

This study was supported by the NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (Grant #OIA-1849227) and the Builders Initiative Foundation. The study also features researchers from the Darling Marine Center and the University of British Columbia. From Bigelow Laboratory, co-authors include Shane Farrell and Nichole Price.

Research team extracted a sediment core from below a commercial kelp farm aboard the Darling Marine Center’s research vessel Ira C in 2022.

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Credit: Samuel Tan, Bigelow Laboratory

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Credit: Samuel Tan, Bigelow Laboratory

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Journal

PLOS One

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0331416 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

Using eDNA tools to examine the impact of kelp farming on underlying sediments

Article Publication Date

15-Sep-2025

 

Gut infections often overlooked in men who have sex with men

A new review article stresses the need for better public health measures to stem transmission and antibiotic resistance. 

University of Washington School of Medicine/UW Medicine

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A lab culture plate growing Shigella, one of the more problematic pathogens that can infect the gut. 

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Credit: Ferric C. Fang

It’s time to develop more effective ways to control and prevent sexually transmitted gut infections, urge the authors of an article appearing today in Clinical Microbiology Reviews, a journal of the American Society of Microbiology 

“Global emergence of several multidrug-resistant gut pathogens and the potential for crossover transmissions among different at-risk populations underscores the importance of prompt diagnosis, appropriate treatment, and the need to consider community-level education and testing,” they wrote.  

The article’s senior author is Dr. Ferric C. Fang, professor of microbiology, laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. In addition to his research, he oversees the clinical microbiology laboratory at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.  

What has become particularly troubling is that these infections are becoming harder to treat and can persist for longer periods of time. In their review, Fang and his colleagues discuss several sexually transmitted enteric pathogens that have become extremely multi-drug resistant. Because of the ease of international travel, the transmission of gastrointestinal superbugs is no longer an isolated problem but a global health concern. 

Researchers and public health officials have recognized since the late 1960s and early 1970s that enteric infections can be sexually transmitted, and that this route of spread occurs more frequently among men who have sex with men. (Enteric refers to the lower digestive tract.) 

Gut infections among this population are “the newest of the old diseases,” their article says.  

Public health responses to enteric disease outbreaks sometimes fall between the cracks, the authors explained. Tracing the origins of outbreaks typically involves looking into food-borne exposures. Health care providers may overlook the possibility of sexual transmission, while programs to control sexually transmitted diseases typically focus on traditional causes like syphilis and gonorrhea. Also, medical data available to epidemiologists may lack information about sexual history.  

A wide variety of pathogens can cause enteric infections in men who have sex with men, but the illnesses have similar symptoms. All these disease agents, whether bacteria, viruses, amoebas or other protozoans, and additional kinds of parasites, can set off diarrhea. 

Fang pointed out that advances in molecular testing of patient samples have improved detection of causative organisms and their genetic strains. These more sensitive tests can assist in determining the most appropriate treatment, as well as help efforts to trace transmission.  

Fang and colleagues reviewed a dozen recognized STEI pathogens. These include Campylobacter, diarrhea-causing strains of Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Shigella, Entameoba histolytica, Giardia, Strongyloides, Cryptosporidium, Cystoisospora, Microsporidia, and hepatitis A virus. For a few other pathogens, the role of sexual activity in their transmission is uncertain. These include Clostridioides (Clostridium) difficile, a pathogen that can take up long-term residence in the gut, Brachyspira, a spirochete bacterium that colonizes the intestines, and hepatitis E and other enteric viruses.  

The researchers noted that people’s behavior, rather than their HIV or immune status, appears to be driving the rise in sexual transmission of enteric pathogens, which has taken off since the end of the COVID pandemic.  

The scientists were initially concerned that HIV or drugs used for the prevention of HIV, or antibiotics for pre- or post-exposure to other types of sexually transmitted illnesses, might be major factors. But except for protozoal infections, there appears to be no difference in the rate of enteric pathogens affecting HIV-positive or HIV-negative men. 

Oral-anal contact, or rimming, is the primary way that enteric infections are spread during sexual activity, the review found. The authors add that recent cultural changes have created more opportunities for gut pathogens to find new hosts. Sexual encounters with new partners are readily made through online sites and digital connections. The use of condoms and other safe-sex barriers is declining as prophylactic medications against AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea have become more readily available. Chemsex, or the use of recreational drugs to enhance sexual activity, can also lower inhibitions.  

The authors expressed hope that education can make people more aware that serious enteric infections can be acquired and spread from sexual activity. Safe-sex practices and refraining from sexual contact for two weeks after an episode of diarrhea can prevent others from becoming infected and thereby break the chain of transmission.  

Men who have sex with men who are more likely to acquire sexually transmitted enteric infections tend to be younger, urban, travel internationally and have wider sexual networks.  

Enteric infections may also move back and forth between different population groups in a community, the article noted. People experiencing homelessness are at risk if they live in unsanitary conditions and exchange sex for money or other needs. People who are immunocompromised are also more susceptible to these infections and their more serious complications.  

What has become particularly troubling is that these infections are becoming harder to treat and can persist for longer periods of time. In their review, Fang and his colleagues discuss several sexually transmitted enteric pathogens that have become extremely multi-drug resistant. Because of the ease of international travel, the transmission of gastrointestinal superbugs is no longer an isolated problem but a global health concern.  

Other authors of this article, which is the first comprehensive review of sexually transmitted enteric infections, also called STEI, are Drs. Kira Newman of the University of Michigan, Gretchen Snoeyenbos Newman of Wayne State University in Detroit, and Chase A. Cannon, medical director of the Public Health Seattle & King County STD Clinic and assistant professor of medicine, Division of Allergy and Infectious Disease, at the UW School of Medicine.   

 

 

 

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Journal

Clinical Microbiology Reviews

DOI

10.1128/cmr.007-23 

Method of Research

Literature review

Article Title

Sexually transmitted enteric infections in men who have sex with men

Article Publication Date

17-Sep-2025

COI Statement

Chase Cannon receives grant support from Hologic. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.