Can a Geothermal Startup Drill the Deepest Holes Ever?
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, March 7th. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. For at least a generation, steering kids into STEM fields has felt like guiding them towards certain prosperity. But as bots replace entry-level software writers and even take on certain surgical tasks, some science and tech professionals are doing the once unthinkable. WSJ columnist Callum Borshers tells us about the surprising career advice they're giving their kids.

Then, geothermal energy, the heat from the earth that can be used to generate electricity, could provide clean and renewable power. But accessing that energy deep underground can be challenging. Now, a startup called Quaze Energy is banking on President Trump's support for geothermal. WSJ reporter Benoit Moren tells us about Quaze's futuristic tech and how it's aiming to drill the deepest hole ever.

But first, it's the age of artificial intelligence. But some parents who work on tech's cutting edge are encouraging their kids to pursue a different career path. Their advice? Go into the arts. Our columnist Callum Borshers tells us about this change in parental guidance. Callum, what's the difference between a parent and a parent?

In order for us to get a sense of how much of a shift this might be, I want to start with, to what extent do people seem to view tech as the career ticket generally? The biggest indicator I see is just how many more degrees we see conferred in computer science from when I was in college. Not that long ago, Charlotte. I mean, 2009, we had 37 or so thousand computer science degrees coming out from bachelor's programs.

That number has almost tripled since then. And so it's not just that kids all of a sudden develop this newfound interest in computer science. A big part of it is thinking, well, that's where the jobs are. Right. And it would be hard to say that those people or their parents have been wrong in recent years.

Except for maybe just the last couple of very recent years where we see a spate of layoffs in the tech sector. And for the people who were maybe part of that generation, the millennial parents who now have kids of their own, maybe they went into tech because they thought that's going to be the safe, smart, lucrative career. They're second guessing that plan for their own little ones now.

All right. So then what's the advice now? Well, it sounds kind of corny, but from a lot of the parents I talked to, it was just follow what you're interested in and what you're good at, because it's a fool's errand to try to predict what the job market or the hot job is going to be 10, 15, 20 years from now.

I talked to a woman named Jeannie Chung, for example. She's 32, said she wanted to major in English and write fiction. And her parents were like, there's no money in the liberal arts, honey. You should do something science-y. So that's what she did. She works in AI now. But she's like, if I have a daughter someday who says I want to grow up and be an author, I'm going to say, OK, great. How widespread is this shift? Like,

To me, it's kind of intuitive as an individual from the singular point of view that I have that like, you know, follow what you're interested in. The fallback plan is not the same as it was, but I'm only one person. How widespread is this? We'll see if the major selections change dramatically in the coming years to figure out how widespread the shift really is. But it's interesting talking to the parents who

really try to keep their finger on the pulse of where are the jobs going as they try to give some guidance to their kids. Rajiv Modumba, who I spoke with, said he was very strategic about his own career selection when he moved here from India in the early aughts. He said, coding wasn't really my cup of tea, but I could see that

tech was where everything was going at that time. And he's one of those dads who said, I encouraged my kids to learn Python and programming languages when they were young, thinking like that's the hot skill that they're going to need. Now he's got a girl who's a high school junior. She's looking at colleges, thinks she wants to major in biology, and he's not exactly telling her no, but he is saying, hey, make sure you keep up with your dance lessons and your vocal lessons, because I look at

the woman who runs your dance studio and she seems to earn a pretty good living. And oh, by the way, I think that the robot isn't coming for her job. So I'm just tickled by this idea that dads with teens who dream of science careers are telling them to be practical, honey, and make sure you study music too as a fallback plan. It's so backwards from what we've heard for so long. That was WSJ columnist Callum Borschers. Coming up, could a beam of electromagnetic energy traveling at the speed of light

Dig the deepest human-made holes ever? How one geothermal startup is hoping to tap energy sources deep underground after the break.

Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash gold. MX Business Gold Card. Built for business by American Express.

A startup called Quaze Energy is deploying new technology to vaporize rock and access geothermal heat miles and miles underground. Although geothermal amounts to less than 1% of U.S. power generation, the sector has seen technological advances that have caught the attention of governments and investors. For more on this, we're joined by WSJ reporter Benoit Morenne.

Benoit, since we're going to be talking about a geothermal power company, give us a refresher. What is geothermal power? How does it work?

Well, geothermal power is a renewable energy alongside solar and wind. It's not as known, I guess, to the public because it's hard to scale. It's energy that you produce by harnessing natural heat in the ground. Some buildings use it for heating. So it's been around for a while. It only amounts to about 0.3% of U.S. power generation, though.

And that's because there are only so many places in the US where you can drill geothermal wells and not break the bank. Once you get down to certain depth to tap into pockets of heat, heat reservoirs, it gets really expensive. So...

Up to this point, companies have looked at places like Northern California, where you have this natural reservoir and where you have one of the largest geothermal developments in the world. And if you look outside of the U.S., that would be developed in places that have lots of volcanoes and lots of heat. So that would be Indonesia, for instance, or the Philippines. That's been the situation with geothermal, which is that it's a great source of power 24-7, 24-7.

but it's been pretty expensive to go outside of those locales where you can find that power. Okay, you focused on one geothermal startup in particular here. What is Quaze aiming to do? So this is a geothermal company that has a very ambitious goal of

to bring geothermal power to the masses, as it were. They sort of realized that you could borrow technology from the oil and gas world, apply it to geothermal, and work with these guys to break this new ground. The issue with geothermal is that you can only do it where heat is readily accessible, under the Earth's surface.

And usually that takes you to about one or two kilometers. And then it starts to get very expensive and hard if you want to get further down because the rock is harder and harder. But Quaze says that it's developed this technology that can make it much easier and cheaper to drill down to incredible depth, up to 12 miles is how deep they say they want to drill, which they say would help unlock geothermal across the globe.

We spoke with Quay's co-founder and CEO, Carlos Araque, just over a year ago on our Future of Everything podcast. Here's what he said about the company's drilling technique. We talk about millimeter wave drilling. It's basically using ideas from fusion research. We use energy beams, not lasers, but masers with an M to vaporize rock.

Benoit, go into a bit more depth for me here. How does Quaze's technique work? Their secret weapon is a gyrotron.

Think of it essentially as a big, very expensive microwave. We have to go back to the Soviets for its origin story because it was invented by the Soviets in the 60s and now it's widely used in fusion labs around the world. That's because those devices can heat hydrogen plasma to temperatures measured in millions of degrees Celsius. So, Quaze is repurposing that machine

to aim it not at plasma, but at very, very hard rock that it just plans to vaporize, to melt in order to drill. So it heats the stone to around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. We're still at numbers that are unimaginable to me. What are the pros and cons of this technique? The pros is that you get to drill super deep holes

at a relatively affordable cost. So you could drill, according to the company, at a rate of about 11.5 feet an hour. At that rate, it would take you between six and seven months to get to maybe 12 miles deep. The deeper you get, the harder it gets.

That means that you can develop exponentially more energy out of that geothermal well. So it's a good proposition from a business perspective. It might be pricey, but you get a lot of power out of it. The cons is just that it's never been done ever before.

Why are we seeing this startup now? It's a good time to be in geothermal right now. There's such a crazy need for power coming from, among others, AI data centers, those hyperscalers, the Microsofts and Meta of the world, that companies like Quaze find this propitious environment to develop that sort of technology because they can provide power.

If that works, 24-7 power, which is what those data centers need to run around the clock. And that needs to be firm, that needs to be reliable. So that's why you've seen a bunch of geothermal startups raise a lot of money in the past few years. And you have the support politically involved.

from this Trump administration. The Biden administration was very keen on trying to make geothermal a bigger part of the energy pie. And the Trump administration is no different. The Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, has been very supportive of the technology. So the CEO of Quaze is very hopeful that they will find support with this current administration.

That was our reporter Benoit Moren. And be sure to check out our Future of Everything podcast episode all about geothermal energy. We've linked it in our show notes. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter. I'm your host, Charlotte Gartenberg. Additional support this week from Julie Chang. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Catherine Milsop.

We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.