YouSaid · the spoken record

Carlos Araque

lines on the record: 54
first: 2022-08-04
most recent: 2022-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm dedicating my life to it. This is what I'm doing every day of my life. So technology development is hard. You go and do it as best as you can. You build the best teams you can. And that's what gives you confidence. We think we're going to succeed. We're vested in the success of this because we need to transition energy.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is correct, it's clean energy. So, 20, 30 years, let's see, I mean, it's going to take more than 20, 30 years to repar every single power plant and build new ones. So let's say by 2050 we have on the order of one to five terawatts. That's probably a healthy 20% of global energy needs. But certainly after that, you start talking about the majority of energy coming from here.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get that question a lot, but think about this. The Earth has been leaking forty terawatts, twice as much energy as we humans consume from within. It's been leaking. So whether we're here or not, whether we're tapping it or not, it's already losing a lot more energy than we need. So I don't think that's going to happen not in a billion years.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's going to be 50% or more, so this is truly a replacement of fossil fuels today. Fossil fuels are about two thirds of energy? We aspire to have that but with geothermal, so the majority, certainly more than fifty percent.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“dozens to hundreds, low hundreds. I mean, we're talking about a dozen wells producing a gigawatt, the largest cities of the world are in the tens of gigawatts. We're talking about a handful of wells. You're not talking about thousands or tens of thousands of whales to get the energy output that these cities need.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess the limit is how many trillion ricks can we have out there doing things. But if there's any hint in the oil industry, there's millions of oil wells drilled so we can drill millions of geothermal wells.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, because we're not really into methane, we're drilling way, way below that, right? So we're just really into hot dry rock. You know, we're talking about kilometers beyond where oil and gas normally is found. So you're really not tapping into those resources.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't think you can do anything else, but you're right. It's 12 wells for that amount of energy to run San Francisco.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. This is very much part of the design. There's no other way to meet the energy transition requirements unless we're counting on those 3 million jobs that already exist in the oil and gas industry. And it's also the jobs of the power plants. There's a lot of power plants with jobs. Those can continue to operate. You said it before. This is urgent. We got to do this very, very quickly. We cannot afford to create supply chains and workforces from scratch fossil fuels has a huge advantage. And if you repurpose that to geothermal, you're way ahead of the game.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the power plant's already built, and all we have to do is to feed the steam that's carbon-free. And you can do each one in weeks. That's precisely the play we're after. Now there's 10,000 of them to convert around the world, so there's a lot of work to do.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. So you're going to save the fuel cost over the lifetime of that power plant and you're going to replace it with the cost of making the geothermal fuel. And it's actually going to come ahead. You know, building the geothermal fuel is going to make more sense economically speaking than buying the coal for the next 30 years.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has to be competitive with wind and solar and coal, right? So we're talking about one, two, three cents per kilowatt hour, and that gives you the ability to really do this systematically, no matter where you are. The world will get serious about carbon taxes, and that will make coal more expensive. So it works in favor of this.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It these things take a lot of money and a lot of time. So, support and capitalization is important. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars to show that this can work. So that's a big one. The other one is technology. We have to scale the technology up. That's a little bit of engineering. And those things take a lot of time and effort. And the third one is making sure that the world continues to be supportive of decarbonization, right? Because if the world forgets about decarbonization, none of these things matter anymore, right? So I think all of those things will converge to clear the way and we'll succeed in repairing that power plant by the end of the decade.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. We just want to show that we can do it and we're going to do it with the right partners to make sure we can get all that expertise. So yeah.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So 2024 is what we say we're going to do. And after that, you start the journey doors repairing a power plant. And that takes us the better part of the rest of the decade. So 2027-28 is when we intend to recover the first power plant.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's in the lab, right? So we're talking about inches, a couple of inches going towards feet by the end of the year. But to do deeper than that, you actually have to build a machine that goes in the field and going to tens of feet 100 meters. Those are the ones we're building now. So we're building the machines that will allow us to do this out there, not in the lab. And that allows us to demonstrate that we can actually do it. We have the sites already identified, the Western United States. Oregon is one of the key sites for us in Oregon.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, how much clean energy does the world need? Trillions of dollars worth of it over the next twenty, thirty, forty years. So there is a lot of money to be made. And that's going to be an important part of making this scale fast. You know, I want geothermal to look as attractive to the oil and gas industry as their current business oil and gas is”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is. Yeah, we have two investors that are oil and gas companies and they are very, very keen and very supportive of doing this technology. Others are watching from the sidelines. You know, some of them incredulous, some of them very, very curious. Clearly, this looks and feels a lot like what they're used to. So once it works, this is going to be a no-brainer for them to endorse and to actually do for themselves”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“million dollars $20 million per well if it's 20 kilometers so it is expensive but think about it you're going to get energy out of that hole for the next 30 to 50 years It pays for itself”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So surprisingly not, I mean there's enough visionaries in this world that will see the potential of these ideas and will give the money. The more challenging part is to continue to make that bigger and bigger and bigger. It means one thing to raise one, two, three, five million dollars and it's another one to raise 50 or more million dollars. So don't get me wrong. These things take a lot of time and diligence to get off the ground, but believe me, there's amazing people in this world with a lot of capital that will see the value of the ideas we're proposing.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Turns into glass. And this glass actually supports the hole itself. This happens in nature guide. If you look at volcanoes, there's glass pipes that get formed and these things endure for geological time. So we know this is doable.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you're drilling the energy, you use temperature to stabilize the hole, and it basically keeps itself open, it creates a glass wall that's very, very, very strong. We've seen this in the lab.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything that's down there in the basement rock can be vaporized through this. If you try to vaporize a metallic wall, it's not going to work, but there's no metallic walls down there. So rock vaporizes”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can absolutely. That's the power of this idea. We're beaming a megawatt of energy consistently to vaporize this rock.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a gyro drum, but the drilling rig is the same. So the only difference is we're going to integrate a gyrorome, which is, it basically generates microwaves, and we're going to beam this energy through the pipe that's hanging from the drilling rig. So if you look at it, you couldn't tell the difference between an oil and gas rig operation and what we're doing, but we're injecting energy into the hole. We're not rotating a drill string.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is the power of geothermal precisely. Right on the spot you repower the power plant, you make it clean, you move on to the next one.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And it could be one, two, three holes, it could be 10, 15, 20 kilometers, but that's precisely it. And everybody talks about retiring the power plants, you know, breaking them down. We have 10,000 power plants building the world. How about we just repower them with clean geothermal steam?”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So we would do this very close to an existing power plant because we want to pump water into that hole. We want to convert it to steam and we want to run the steam through the power plant. Just like it's been doing forever.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. You have to do this because you have to do a lot of them to repower civilization. That's what we're talking about. We're not talking about years even. We're talking about weeks.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So most drilling for oil and gas is relatively shallow. It only takes two to three kilometers to get to it. It's mostly close to the surface, right? Deeper than that, you have geothermal, which is the heat from the Earth. And that goes a little bit deeper than that.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it did take them from the early 70s to the late 80s. It was a scientific experiment trying to go that deep. And they picked a place on the earth where it wasn't too hot. So they were really trying to keep it easy. It's not just about going deep. It's about going hot as well. So at the bottom of that hole, they reach 200 degrees Celsius, about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. We're saying something different. We're not only going to drill those holes and deeper, but we're also going to do it much, much hotter because that's the price. We want the temperature. That's what we want to tap into.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we think we can get to 20 kilometers. This is twice as deep as we've ever drilled as humans and precisely what's needed to make geothermal totally global and ubiquitous.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. We vaporize rock. We literally vaporize rock and then we simply blow the ash. You know, those vapors become ash. We simply blow it out of the hole. And you keep doing this and you can get to depths that are impossible today with mechanical drill.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're moving away from mechanical drill bits, the drill bit wears because the rock is hard and it's hot and you have to retrieve the drill bit from the bottom of that well. So you spend a lot of time replacing the drill bit and not drilling, and as you go deeper and deeper, you spend even more time not drilling but replacing the drill bit. So the way we attack the problem is by moving away from mechanical systems. It's a radical new way to do the drilling. We're using electromagnetic waves. We're using microwaves more precisely to literally vaporize a hole to rock. So this basically changes everything about drilling.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I first listened to him, I said, okay, what he's talking about is a disruption to how we drill into the earth. We can drill deeper, hotter, faster, and therefore we can unlock geothermal. Like Iceland, but for everybody on Earth, no matter where you are. And Paul Wascov was the person who first pointed this out and not only pointed out, but he actually procured funding to go and show it in the lab. Now, he never drilled twenty kilometers down, but he demonstrated the scientific principles that would allow that to be possible.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ability to drill deep enough. I think that's what changed, right? So when I met Paul Waskoff, I understood very quickly that he was.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No matter where you are in the world, could you make every single country energy independent? And the answer is yes. But how deep do you have to go? Well, if you want to cover the entire planet, if you want to make sure every single human being has access to geothermal energy, not just a little bit of it, not just a little bit to bathe in hot water, but also to power every single appliance and every single use of modern life, you have to drill twenty kilometers at most, that's twelve miles. That doesn't mean you do it everywhere, but if you can do that, everything changes. You unlock a heat source, an energy source unlike anything that's available. It's right under your feet. It's local. It's no fuels. It's no waste. It's there. There's nothing that provides the energy security that geothermal can provide if you can go and tap it at those depths.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, precisely. I mean, and in the end, what we're proposing to do is don't change anything about what you just described. Just don't do it with a fossil fuel. Just get the steam from the ground, move the turbine, make electricity. But the question stretches”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, this heat essentially does the same that your coal power plant or gas power plant does. It boils water and that water moves the turbine which makes electricity. It's just that for them it's easy because they can use the technology that already exists to do it. For everybody else in the world, that's not the case.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transition energy every 25 years. So, this is really not about 2050. This is about setting up for the next 100 to 200 years. So we're really not designing for even 20, 30, 40 terawatts. We're designing for 100 plus terawatts. So certainly at those scales, you very quickly run out of options. And the only options left are those three.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I converge on three things, and this is thinking at it like an engineer. I understood the oil industry well. I understood that it powered most of civilization. And I understood how much energy that implies. So when you look at that, I think there's only three things that can do it. The first one is indeed nuclear fission, as you just mentioned. It has the scalability and the power density to do it. The second one is fusion, which is what the sun does, but it's still experimental and in research. And the third one is deep geothermal. Aside from those three, there's nothing else that can scale to the number of terawatts that we need. We consume about twenty three terawatts in twenty twenty two. And keep in mind, Guy, we cannot afford”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it would, but the ecological consequences would be just as bad as putting CO2 into the atmosphere. So without getting too technical, the concept of power density matters here. So the idea that you use land to procure your power, when you start talking about the scale of the energy needs of humanity, which are ever increasing, if you try to do that with wind and solder, given that their power density is much, much less than fossil fuels, it would imply a premium on land use. We're talking about a hundred times. At those scales it starts to become an issue. It's like trading a black eye for two black eyes, right? So we cannot read that. It's not going to be sustainable.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew I was going to learn about venture capital, which was going to be a big part of the puzzle. Now, it all converged much more serendipitously than that, because not only did I learn venture capital, but I also learn about this technology that would become Quais.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I became convinced that the reason we don't transition energy is first and foremost because we do not have a species the technology to do it. Politics play a role, but it is really a technological gap first and foremost. So as I started to reason my way through these things and say, okay, if it's a technology gap, I'm pretty good at technology. Let's go and find what that is. I then learned that in order to finance these very difficult technical undertakings, their capital intensive time intensive, it takes very high risk capital. And if you're going to do that outside of the agenda of a corporation, it's probably going to be venture capital. So that's how I started converging on that pathway.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that came later, but I obeyed that instinct. I said, you know, I need to walk away from oil and gas and try to find my way as a professional, as an engineer in these energy transition. That's surely going to happen in the rest of our lifetimes.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my wife was the first one to point that out. To me, it all happened very late in my career, but according to her, it happened much earlier. I've been married to her for more than 21 years. So she knows me right outside of MIT as we were 22 and 23. I started becoming restless about energy transition around 2015, 2016. I said to myself, you know, I have half of my career ahead of me. And I don't think it's going to be oil related. You know, the energy transition will happen in our generation. It has to happen. And I am in a very good spot given my experience and still my career ahead of me to actually transition myself into something different. I didn't know that it was going to be geothermal. I didn't know that it was going to be quay.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Career, you inevitably get into the business side of things, you get into the commercialization side of things. So I became very aware of what it took to not only build and design these systems, these technologies, but also put them out into the world as commercial offerings by one of the largest, perhaps the largest technology company in the oil industry.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's remarkable to imagine how many things going to making oil available to humanity. And there's a lot of technology that goes behind that. So right after MIT 2002, went to Houston, started my career there, very technical, always wanted to be an engineer and be building things, and lived in Houston for eight years before I got transferred to Norway and then to England to expand my career in other directions. Drilling was part of that, but it was not the only part of that. There's other things like knowing where the oil is. How do you know where things are down there? How do you produce it efficiently? How do you process it? So a lot of technologies that from end to end make it possible. And I became very familiar with all of them from a very technical angle. Of course, as you mature,”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are originally a French company, but by the time I joined they were truly an international company, and Schlomberger hired me in one of the Houston facilities to be an engineer, to design tools that would go downhole into an oil well and do something.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To you know 60 70 miles an hour, so quite fascinating that you can actually do this with solar energy so very hands-on, a lot of engineering went into that and very early experience with actually building things that work and not only work but work reliably and consistently.”
2022-08-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Quaise Energy: Carlos Araque · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT