It was called the Kola Superdeep Borehole, and over the course of 19 years, they managed to reach a depth of 12 kilometers. Then they stopped. Not because they ran out of ambition but because they ran into problems we still have not solved today: heat, pressure, and hazardous geological conditions.
Fast forward fifty years. We have supercomputers, reusable rockets, and artificial intelligence that writes poetry — and yet, drilling into the Earth still looks surprisingly similar to how it did in the age of disco. The drill bits are shinier, the muds more sophisticated, the rigs more automated, but the core limitation is the same: we are trying to scratch and scrape our way through the planet with brute force. The deeper we go, the harder it gets. Literally.
And yet, this challenge hides an almost mythic opportunity.
Because deep beneath our feet lies an energy source so clean, so abundant, and so constant, it’s almost embarrassing how little we have tapped into it.
Geothermal energy is not a new idea. But globally, it accounts for less than 1% of electricity production. Not because it does not work, but because we have not been able to make it work everywhere.
That is what we are setting out to change.
The Earth, it turns out, is a terrible conductor. Which is precisely what makes it such a good battery. About 20% of the heat beneath our feet comes from the chaos of our planet’s birth — a four-billion-year-old leftover. The rest comes from radioactive decay still happening right now in the crust and mantle. Add it all up, and we are sitting on an essentially unlimited energy source. The only catch? You have to reach it.
In some places — volcanic islands, tectonic fault lines — the hot rock is shallow enough that we can get to it with current tools. You drill a few kilometers, hit a hot water reservoir, spin a turbine, and voilà: geothermal power. But these places are rare. In most of the world, the rock is deeper and the temperature lower.
So what if we stop looking for the perfect spot — and just drill deeper?
Here is where it gets interesting.
Every extra kilometer underground gets exponentially more expensive. Conventional drill bits wear out. Progress slows to a crawl. And worst of all, if you drill wrong, the whole thing becomes a sunk-cost disaster.
That is why most geothermal projects look like expensive bets on geological luck. This is why investors shy away, governments regulate tightly, and technology has never quite scaled.
Unless you change the game entirely.
At Telura, we started with a simple premise: what if geothermal energy did not need to rely on natural water reservoirs, perfect rock formations, or the political tightrope of fracking?
What if we could go deeper — much deeper — and still make it work?
The downside? The deeper you go, the more heat you get. But the deeper you go, the more expensive it gets. Unless you can find a way to drill that does not rely on mechanical wear and tear.
That is the bottleneck. And that is where Telura begins.
We are not alone in this idea. In the past five years, more than half a billion dollars has flowed into geothermal startups in North America and Europe. Large corporations enforce their efforts in this space, too. Something is shifting.
But especially in Europe, the movement is not fast enough. Regulatory caution, lower risk tolerance, and fewer teams building with the speed and technical audacity of their North American peers. We saw a gap — and an opportunity.
After months of deep technical work — simulations, expert interviews, lab visits, and economic modeling — we found a path that we are convinced will work out. A radical new drilling approach.
We have run the numbers, talked to the physicists, and stress-tested the simulations. We know the challenges ahead — and we know there is no law of nature saying this cannot be done. It is an engineering problem now. And one we are ready to take on.
The world is changing fast. AI workloads are demanding more power. The energy transition is no longer a nice-to-have, but a race against time. And the only energy source that is clean, consistent, local, and untethered from the weather is deep beneath our feet.
We started Telura because the planet had already given us the answer. We just have to reach it.
And this time, we are drilling deeper than anyone ever has.
