He spent fifteen years helping the world find oil. Now he is trying to make oil wells obsolete - by drilling into rock hot enough to melt a drill bit.
The engineer who wants the oil business to grow up - and become geothermal.
There is a furnace under your feet. Go down far enough - two miles, ten miles, twelve - and the rock gets hot enough to boil the water in any power plant on the surface. Carlos Araque's company, Quaise Energy, is trying to reach it. Not with a bigger drill bit, but with a beam of energy borrowed from fusion research that vaporizes stone. His argument is disarmingly simple: the same turbines, the same plants, the same drilling crews we use for fossil fuels can run on the heat below. We just have to dig deep enough to find it.
Quaise's problem was never a lack of heat. Heat is everywhere underground and there is effectively no limit to it. The problem was that conventional drill bits melt, warp and wear out long before they reach the temperatures worth having. So Araque's team stopped grinding rock and started vaporizing it. Their tool is a gyrotron, the same class of high-power microwave device physicists build for fusion experiments, aimed down a borehole to blast millimeter waves at the rock face until it turns to vapor.
In 2025 that idea stopped being a slide in a pitch deck. In field tests in Texas, Quaise drilled a hole 118 meters deep with no mechanical bit touching the bottom. Through 2026 the company has been construction on a pilot superhot geothermal project in the western United States, commissioning a one-megawatt gyrotron - roughly ten times more powerful than its earlier systems - and pushing field drilling from the low hundreds of meters toward a thousand.
The destination is a depth where water stops behaving like water. Past about 400 degrees Celsius and enough pressure, it becomes supercritical: neither liquid nor gas, and packed with far more energy than the steam that spins turbines today. Reach that, Araque says, and a geothermal well can match the output of a fossil or nuclear plant - and plug into the same grid hardware.
Geothermal energy is available everywhere on massive scales. If you take all fossil, all nuclear, and all other forms of renewable energy combined, they are not even a millionth of a millionth of the thermal stores of energy below the Earth's surface.
Before the gyrotrons and the terawatt talk, there was a boy in Medellin taking things apart. Growing up in Colombia through the turbulent 1980s and 90s, Araque and his father would strip down bicycles and motorcycles and rebuild them. That habit - understand a machine by dismantling it - carried him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor's and a master's in mechanical engineering and built cars from scratch on the MIT Electric Vehicle Team.
Then came the pivot he now spends his days trying to reverse. He went into oil and gas, joining Schlumberger, and stayed roughly fifteen years leading downhole product and technology development. He learned to drill deep and hard. He also saw the damage the industry did up close - and started looking for a way to point the same hard-won skills somewhere cleaner.
The turn came at The Engine, MIT's fund and platform for commercializing tough science, where Araque served as technical director from 2017 to 2018. There he met Dr. Paul Woskov of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, who had spent years quietly proving you could bore through rock with millimeter waves. Most people filed it under fringe. Araque saw a company.
He co-founded Quaise around Woskov's research to commercialize it at scale, and set out to raise the money and build the team to drill the deepest, hottest holes anyone has attempted. The backers came: Vinod Khosla was an early believer, joined over time by Engine Ventures, Safar Partners, Collaborative Fund, Mitsubishi and drilling giant Nabors.
Not a new grid, a new hole. Reuse the fossil-fuel world's plants, turbines and skilled workers - swap the fuel for heat that never runs out.
Nobody has drilled this deep and this hot before. Conventional bits die in the heat. The gyrotron approach has to work at commercial scale, not just in Texas test holes.
Carbon-free baseload power, available almost anywhere on Earth - just far enough down that you have to be patient, and stubborn, to reach it.
Araque is a frequent voice on energy podcasts and climate stages - from How I Built This to MIT Technology Review's ClimateTech. Start with Quaise's own channel and follow the drilling from there.