Quaise closes $180M to drill five kilometres down and build the first superhot geothermal plant
The MIT spinout's Series B includes $35M from drilling contractor Nabors Industries and funds Project Obsidian, near Oregon's Newberry Volcano.
Quaise Energy has announced the final close of its Series B, raising $180 million in equity financing and bringing the company's total funding to $280 million. The round includes a $35 million strategic investment from Nabors Industries, the drilling contractor.
Quaise is a spinout of the MIT Energy Initiative.
The technical bet
Conventional geothermal power works where the geology cooperates - where hot rock sits close enough to the surface to be reached with conventional drilling. That is a short list of places.
Quaise is developing millimetre-wave drilling intended to reach superhot rock at depths beyond five kilometres. The company's argument is that at those temperatures, geothermal generation becomes viable at far greater scale and in far more locations than the conventional resource allows.
This is genuinely hard engineering, and it is worth being clear that it is unproven at commercial depth. The financing is what pays for finding out.
Project Obsidian
The money funds Project Obsidian, which Quaise describes as the world's first commercial superhot geothermal power plant. It is being built near the Newberry Volcano in central Oregon.
The plant is planned in stages: an initial 50 megawatt phase, then 250 megawatts, and eventually more than a gigawatt.
What Nabors brings
The Nabors investment comes with a strategic framework covering drilling operations, technology integration and commercial development. Under the agreement Quaise gets access to a dedicated Nabors land rig, along with technology for reservoir modelling, well design and drilling strategy.
That is the part of this deal that matters most. Deep drilling is an operational discipline as much as a technological one, and it is the kind of capability that is very slow to build from scratch and very quick to acquire through a partner who already has rigs in the field.
Why it matters
Quaise is a useful counterexample to the assumption that climate capital has dried up. It has not - it has become more selective, and it has moved toward projects with physical output and identifiable offtake rather than software layers on top of energy markets.
A $180 million round for a company whose next milestone is a hole in the ground in Oregon is a reasonable indicator of where that selectivity currently points.
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