Quaise, explained.
How Quaise Energy plans to reach rock hot enough to power a city, with a beam instead of a drill bit. Nine drawings. Dotted words explain themselves. Scroll, or let it roll.
There is heat under every city. It is just far down.
Go deep enough, anywhere, and the rock is hot enough to make power day and night, whatever the weather. The question has never been where. It is how far.
Every kilometre down, the rock gets hotter.
Away from volcanoes and the edges of the plates, about 25 to 30 °C more each kilometre. Quaise aims for 300 °C and above. Guess how deep that is.
300 °C is aboutSo geothermal lives where the heat comes up to meet it.
Water goes down a well, comes back hot and spins a turbine. It works where hot rock sits close to the surface, near volcanoes and plate edges. Everywhere else, the heat is too deep to reach.
Deeper rock is harder and hotter. Drill bits give up.
Grinding through hot basement rock wears bits out. Past a point, drilling the usual way cannot reach those depths and temperatures at a price that works.
Quaise swaps the bit for a beam.
The first stretch is drilled the usual way. Then a gyrotron, a machine from fusion research, stays on the surface and sends millimetre waves, the same family as a microwave oven's, down ordinary oil-and-gas pipe.
The rock does not break. It turns to vapour.
At the bottom the beam heats the rock until it vaporises. A gas carries the vapour up and out, and the walls are left lined with glass. No bit and no motor down the hole: Quaise calls it drilling with zero contact.
118 metres through granite. Kilometres to go.
In July 2025 Quaise drilled 118 metres into granite at a quarry in central Texas, half a year after leaving the lab. The next target is one kilometre. In most places superhot rock is ten or more down, and that part is still ahead.
Heat under every city, within reach.
Quaise says one superhot well can deliver ten to a hundred times the power of other geothermal, and that this heat is within reach of more than nine in ten people. Project Obsidian, in Central Oregon, plans first power in 2030.
Nine drawings. Ten kilometres down.
Drawn by Bolted. Independent, not sponsored.
The first film made the way a client's would be.
The pilot for Lightline films for other companies: a real company, explained unasked from its own public pages, then sent to them. It is the first reel made with the client package in mind: narration, social cuts, the company's colour and its mark from its own file.
| Status | Script stage, 2 October 2026. The titles and the narration are written; the drawing and the cut are still Jev's. |
|---|---|
| The facts | Everything about Quaise comes from quaise.com, quaiseprojectobsidian.com and their news posts, read on 2 October 2026; the 10 to 100 times and the nine in ten people are their own figures. The 25 to 30 °C per kilometre is the textbook figure for continental crust. Notes in QUAISE.md. |
| The controls | Roll plays it with the narrator. The chapter bar, 1 to 9 and the arrow keys jump. Space rolls, N opens the director's notes, G opens every gloss. |