Matt Houde: 2024 Early Career Award recipient

BSGLE ’16, BS geology and geophysics ’16 (MSCEE ’18, Stanford University)
Co-founder and Chief of Staff, Quaise Energy

A civil and environmental engineer who is developing geothermal solutions that can help the world transition from carbon-based to carbon-free energy.

Matthew Houde’s career led him to the forefront of groundbreaking geothermal energy technology at Quaise Energy. It started thanks to a class taught at UW-Madison.

“Professor James Tinjum was the one who got me interested in renewable energy as we were studying how the geological engineering discipline helps address challenges related to developing and deploying different renewable energy systems,” Houde says.

Houde took Tinjum’s wind energy design class, then worked under him as a research assistant for two years. When he finished at UW-Madison, Houde knew he wanted to work in renewable energy. While attending graduate school at Stanford University, Houde learned about geothermal energy and started thinking how he might combine his two interests.

During an internship with Ormat Technologies, Houde came across superhot rock geothermal—a relatively new idea in the geothermal energy world. With boreholes deeper than 10 kilometers into the earth, this type of geothermal taps temperature in excess of 750 degrees. At these high temperatures, water in the system becomes supercritical. Houde says that gives geothermal energy an energy density comparable to fossil fuels.

Today, Quaise is developing technologies to meet the engineering challenges that come with drilling deep into the earth’s crust. Among those is a drill that uses millimeter-wave directed energy to dig deeper and handle more extreme temperatures than traditional equipment can.

“In the western U.S., there are a lot of areas where geothermal is already favorable—where you can hit superhot temperatures above 10 kilometers,” Houde says. “But if we’re able to drill down 10 to 20 kilometers, then it makes geothermal a source of energy that’s viable in locations without a favorable geothermal gradient, like Wisconsin. I think that’s critical if we want geothermal energy to be a key player in the renewable energy transition.”

What do you enjoy about your career?

I really enjoy the role of not only being in a startup, but also being involved as the co-founder where I can get involved in all aspects of the company. There are a lot of challenges and tradeoffs. But there’s a reward in seeing this technology succeed and in knowing that we can make a substantial impact in addressing climate change by providing a source of clean energy that complements wind and solar energy by providing a stable resource needed for the grid.

Of what professional accomplishment are you most proud?

My main role in founding Quaise was writing the proposal to ARPA-E in the U.S. Department of Energy that funded our initial research. I’m really proud knowing that, when I was still a grad student—basically in the middle of graduation—I was able to put together this proposal with our teams, and coordinate how we would execute this plan to our milestones. That was six years ago, and now we’re a company of more than 50 people doing more advanced research and lab testing than I ever could have imagined back then.

Which do you prefer?

UW Arboretum or Picnic Point?
I love the Arboretum. You can bike for hours there and still see new things. If I have any regrets, it’s that I wish I had taken more bike rides down to the Arboretum while I was in Madison.

Camp Randall, the Kohl Center, or the UW Field House?
My very first football game at Camp Randall was the “welcome to the Big 10” game for Nebraska with Russell Wilson and we just destroyed them. That’s still my favorite sporting event I’ve ever attended.

The Chazen Museum of Art or the Geology Museum?
I was a dual major in geological engineering and geosciences as an undergrad. But even removing that bias, I’ve always been a sucker for dinosaurs and fossils, and you get a good dose of that at the geology museum.