Register for SOSV’s VC-Founder Physical AI Matchup – May 11-15
Back
đŸŽ„ Heat Beneath Our Feet: Unlocking Superhot Geothermal with Carlos Araque, Quaise Energy
Back
Kira Colburn
Kira Colburn
April 16, 2026

At our latest SOSV Deep Tech Live, we sat down with Carlos Araque, the CEO and founder of Quaise Energy, to discuss energy’s biggest challenge. But first, to understand Quaise, you have to understand the math of energy. Today, it takes 25 terawatts to power the world. But that number doubles every 25 to 30 years. By 2075, we’re looking at a 100 terawatt world. How do we enable this world that isn’t one billion barrels of oil today?

Carlos is remarkably blunt about our options. In his view, there is a “solution set of three” that can actually meet that scale: Fission, Fusion, and Deep Geothermal. While wind and solar, batteries, hydro-electric, and others are vital, they simply don’t have the power density to carry a 100-terawatt world alone.

Quaise’s Technology: Vaporizing Rock with Microwaves

Quaise is betting everything on deep geothermal.

The problem with geothermal has never been a lack of heat; it’s been our inability to reach it. Traditional drill bits melt or break long before they hit the “super-hot” rocks required for high-efficiency power. This is where Carlos’s background from oil and gas comes into play. Instead of trying to build a better mechanical drill bit, Quaise is using millimeter-wave energy (essentially high-powered microwaves) to literally vaporize rock.

By switching from mechanical grinding to microwave ablation, Quaise can reach depths of 10 to 20 kilometers, where temperatures hit 400°C (800°F). At this “super-hot” stage, water becomes supercritical, carrying exponentially more energy than the steam used in traditional plants. By reaching these temperatures, geothermal plants can match the power output of fossil fuel or nuclear plants, utilizing the same turbines and infrastructure.

“I want the oil and gas industry to want to do geothermal when it grows up,” Carlos told us.

But Quaise isn’t looking to build every power plant themselves. Instead, they are adopting a “Junior Mining” model: They take the initial $50–100M risk to prove the heat is there. Once the resource is de-risked, the “Majors” (the massive energy companies with the workforce and infrastructure already in place) can step in to scale it.

What’s Next for Quaise?

If this sounds like science fiction, the timeline suggests otherwise. Quaise is currently just 9 months away from the world’s first super-hot Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) flow test in Oregon.

This isn’t just a lab experiment; it’s a precursor to commercial reality. Carlos expects to announce off-take agreements this year, with interest coming from both local communities and energy-hungry hyperscale data centers. For the first time, we are looking at a pathway to energy abundance that doesn’t require a total overhaul of the global grid, but rather a deeper, hotter evolution of it.

đŸŽ„ Find the live recording below as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

📍Broadcast live from our SOSV NY event space in Manhattan, SOSV Deep Tech LIVE is our monthly video podcast series exploring the frontiers of deep tech with leading founders, researchers, and technologists. Check out some of our most popular videos:

Did you know?

How Ten63 turned an academic project into an AI platform for drugging “undruggable” cancers

Bruce Donald, Marcel Frenkel and Mark Hallen are analyzing over 19,290,123 compounds per second at quantum accuracies to develop drugs to previously incurable cancers.

unspun’s Weaving Machines Aim to Fix Apparel’s Waste and Carbon Problem

Funded with $57 million from DCVC, Lowercarbon Capital and SOSV, among others, unspun aims to eliminate 1% of global carbon emissions

NotCo’s plant-based foods are on store shelves, but its AI engine “Giuseppe” is the real business

While it might look like a plant-based food company, NotCo is in the data and AI business—and aims to disrupt R&D in many industries that use animal and plant ingredients.

Smartex is Creating the Textile Factory of the Future

Gilberto Loureiro grew up inspecting fabrics in a Portuguese textile factory. With Smartex, he and co-founders Antonio Rocha and Paulo Ribeiro are eliminating textile defects—and their enormous cost both to manufacturers and the environment.

Novoloop Is Upcycling Your Future

Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao have an uncanny talent for finding value where others see waste. Their plastics upcycling company, Novoloop, just raised an $21m Series A to prove it.

Upside Foods Serves Up a Sustainable Future

To find the future of food, you may have to look no further than Emeryville, CA, a small city by the San Francisco Bay, where Upside Foods has built a 53,000-square-foot production facility for cultivated meat, the first of its kind.

Sleeping Beauty

In a timeless dilemma for new parents, Radhika and her husband Bharath discovered early that their baby daughter was a fussy sleeper. The situation left them tired and frustrated; being effective at work became a challenge.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Entrepreneur

In December 2021 Prellis raised a $14.5 million Series B and has signed partnerships with pharmaceutical behemoths including Bristol Myers Squibb and Sanofi.

Chiu Chau Reboots a Robot into a Billion Dollar Business

It was 2016, and Chiu Chau was on the ropes. He had pitched nearly 150 venture capital firms. No one would invest. Everyone doubted the startup with the open-source laboratory robot.

RxAll’s Life-Saving Deep Tech for African Pharmacies

Adebayo (“Ade”) Alonge and Amy Kao, co-founders of RxAll had nvented a handheld scanner for detecting counterfeit prescription drugs—an illicit, multibillion-dollar industry that kills an estimated 1 million people annually globally and 100,000 in Africa.