A worker at Renmatix pumps sugar produced by the company's new supercritical water process into a storage container. Credit: Renmatix.

The key to making biofuels and biochemicals from sources such as wood and grass, rather than food crops, is finding a cheap way to break down hemicellulose and cellulose into sugar that yeast and other organisms can ferment. Once you have the sugars, making ethanol and other chemicals has already been proven on a commercial scale.

A startup called Renmatix, which we wrote about here, is developing a novel process that uses supercritical water to produce the sugars. It claims the process can produce sugar at costs low enough to compete with producing sugar from sugar cane.

The company got a vote of confidence today with a $30 million investment from a division of the large chemical company BASF, which hopes to use the technology to increase its use of renewable raw materials. In addition to the BASF funding, Renmatix raised $20 million from other sources.

One of the most exciting battery chemistries for electric vehicles is lithium-sulfur--it has the potential to store three times more energy than the lithium-ion batteries currently used in electric cars. Historically, however, it's had a number of problems. Early prototypes could only be recharged a few times, the lithium metal used in one of the electrodes caused short circuits and can react violently with water, creating a safety concern, and the carbon that makes the sulfur electrode conductive takes up too much space, decreasing storage capacity.

Earlier this year we reported on several advances geared toward addressing these problems, and noted that these advances had caught the eye of the chemical giant BASF, which is now working to bring lithium-sulfur batteries to market. But challenges remain, including bringing down costs. Now the Department of Energy has also taken an interest in the technology. This week Sion Power Cooperation (which is working with BASF) announced that it has received a three-year, $800,000 DOE grant to further develop the lithium-sulfur batteries for electric vehicles.